Les Entrées royales à Paris de Marie d'Angleterre (1514) et Claude de France (1517) (review)

The second volume of Cynthia Brown's edition of the works of Pierre Gringore (for volume I, see FS, LVIII [2006], 544-5) presents the poet's manuscript accounts of the entries of two French queens, for which Gringore and his associate, the 'maî tre charpentier' Jean Marchand, had been commissioned by the city fathers to provide allegorical mystères at certain points along the royal itinerary: Porte Saint-Denis, Fontaine du Ponceau, Trinité, Porte aux Peintres, Eglise des Saints-Innocents, Châtelet and Palais Royal. Appendices containing editions of the entries of Anne de Bretagne in 1492 and 1504, together with other accounts of the 1514 and 1517 events, shed valuable light on the relatively neglected subject of the queenly triumphal entry. They also demonstrate the ever more politicized nature of such events as well as highlighting the increasingly distinctive contribution of Gringore himself who, by 1514, had earned a reputation as a sort of theatrical impresario, much involved in the civic pageantry of the capital. In the case of royal entry celebrations, he appears to have graduated from being a mere 'compositeur' for those of Philippe d'Autriche in 1501, to 'Historien et facteur' in 1514, responsible not just for production matters such as casting and the provision of costumes, but also for supplying the texts used in the often complex allegorical tableaux vivants.

An interesting feature to emerge from the dedications to both accounts is Gringore's on-going concern for the protection of authors' rights and his frustration at their lack of control over the behaviour of unscrupulous printers and publishers. It was such concern that had led him in the case of his Folles entreprises of 1505 to be the first author to secure an official privilege to sell and distribute his own books — and here we see him experiencing similar problems in the case of his presentation manuscripts dedicated to Marie and Claude. Brown's detailed comparison of Gringore's records with other, often anonymous, published accounts suggest that his complaints were largely justified, especially in the case of their descriptions of his own mystères, descriptions which are often sketchy, inaccurate and lacking explanatory detail. These anxieties are particularly apparent in his account of Claude's entry, where he almost upstages his dedicatee by elaborately airing his concerns in the dédicace itself. Whether Gringore was hoping to earn Claude's patronage is not known but just a year later, in 1518, he left Paris to take up a post at the court of Lorraine. Brown is to be congratulated on producing a fine, richly documented edition, which also includes, in addition to the usual critical apparatus, a selection of miniatures of some of the pageant stages. The volume constitutes a most welcome addition to the bibliography of the royal entry as well as providing a fascinating insight into the professional concerns of this early-sixteenth-century writer.