REVIEW Riquer, Martín de, ed. Vidas y retratos de trovadores: textos ? miniaturas del siglo XlII. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores y Galaxia Gutenberg, 1995. Pp. xxxiii, [331] Nine of the ninety-five troubadour manuscripts contain miniature paintings that apparently represent the authors of the songs. Three of these manuscripts, C, M, and N, contain paintings and poems but no vidas orrozos; in two more, E andR, the miniatures illustrate the poems, while the prose pieces are grouped separately. In the remaining four manuscripts the miniatures illustrate the vidas and razos. Professor de Riquer has reproduced the miniatures in these four manuscripts (A and // in the Biblioteca Vaticana, / and K in the Bibliothèque Nationale) in luxurious color, and juxtaposed them with the texts of the vidas and razos, which he reprints, with occasional retouches, from the standard edition by Boutière and Schutz. He adds a Spanish translation. He makes clear (xxxiii) that he intends the volume forliterary readers rather than specialists. This is something of a coffee-table book, then, but it has a special claim on our interest because, afterall, the chansonniers themselves may be seen as coffee-table books avant la lettre. Riquer has issued a standing invitation for someone with broad interests and interdisciplinary competence to contribute further art-historical study and understanding ofthe troubadour's legacy. He follows the early work ofJoseph Anglade, who published an inventory ofthe miniatures inA, C, H, I, K, L (one miniature), andM. Katja Laske-Fix wrote an art-historical thesis on the cycle of illuminations in the Breviari d'amor. With the recent renewal ofinterest in manuscripts we have seen work by Angelica Rieger on the illustrations depicting women, and by Maria Luisa Meneghetti on the illustrations as narrative iconography. Most recently two American scholars, Sylvia Huot and Stephen G. Nichols, have looked at the illustrations in N in the Pierpont Morgan Library (New York). Nichols has argued that the illustrations, taken together with the manuscript as 55 REVIEW a whole, imply a coherent program; for him, N is "ordered very much as a series of rules or laws, meditations on conduct and self-governance" (99). Riquer provides a general introduction describing the vidas and razos and the paintings. He supposes, as he puts it (x), that late troubadours were able to use chansonniers for their pleasure and information, and to study in detail the poetry of their predecessors and contemporaries contained in them. He mentions ten names, including Guiraut Riquier, sometimes considered the last of the troubadours (fl. 1254-1292), and Cerveri de Girona (fl. 1259-1285); he adds troubadours whose known activity extended as late as the decade ofthe 1260's (Bertrán d'Alamanon, Guilhem de Montanhagol, Guiraut d'Espanha, Raimon de Tors) or the 1250's (Lanfranc Cigala, Uc de Saint Circ), and earliest ofall, Folquet de Marselha, who was active as a troubadourfrom 1178 to 1195 and died in 1231. Folquet is depicted exclaiming over a parchment role in N, according to the traditional view represented by Meneghetti (see her figure 2), although Nichols suggests that the figure could be a scribe, "both executing and performing the codex" (95); Guiraut Riquier is said to have composed a manuscript by his own hand which was copied into C. But Riquer does not provide these details, or reasons why the other troubadoursmentioned maybethoughttohaveperusedthechansonniers. Considering that the earliest among them are D, dated 1254 in the colophon, and V, similarly dated 1268, we may consider the image of a troubadour poring over a chansonnier rather daring (Elizabeth Aubrey, 35, dates X, a French chansonnier containing a section of troubadour songs, about 1240). The miniatures themselves provide evidence that the chansonniers were luxury products, which is further attested by the nobility and wealth of many oftheir early owners (Paden 311). Nichols has brought to light the "very particularway" that the songs ofArnaut de Mareuil are performed by manuscript N (105). I seriously doubt that many troubadours read songs in the chansonniers before the second half of the thirteenth century, if they did so then. 56 REVIEW Riquerstresses the value ofthe miniatures forthe history ofcostume and heraldry (xxvi-xxxii). He points out an occasional anachronism, as when the...