A Companion to Wace (review)

Composer of some of the most substantial vernacular narrative poems surviving from the twelfth century, Wace died in the 1170s as a canon of Bayeux cathedral, after a long career as administrator and writer that brought him into (and out of ) the patronage of the gentry and royalty of Normandy and England. Wace has generally been recognized in modern scholarship for only a fraction of one of his works—the Arthurian section of his Roman de Brut (based on the Historia Regum Brittaniae), which offers the first surviving vernacular account of the life of Arthur and makes the first surviving mention of the Round Table.

In A Companion to Wace, F.H.M. Le Saux sets out to remedy the deficiencies of what she calls ‘a piecemeal approach’ to Wace (282): this is not a collection of disparate essays, as books with the title Companion often are, but a comprehensive study. Le Saux begins with a brisk, lucid introduction on Wace’s life and times, which offers food for thought as to just how much was entailed in the vernacularization of Latin matter, from commission through copying. She follows with chapters on each of Wace’s hagiographical works (La Vie de sainte Marguerite, La Conception Nostre Dame, and La Vie de saint Nicolas) and multi-chapter sections on the Roman de Brut and the Roman de Rou, his long history of the dukes of Normandy. Le Saux displays full command of the manuscripts, the varied and uneven editions that have appeared of Wace’s work, the political, intellectual, and cultural context, Wace’s own Latin sources, and the work in the field to date. Her bibliography of secondary sources contains over 150 items, and her exemplary footnotes reflect thoughtful, generous engagement with the particulars of previous work. The book is also well indexed.

Le Saux integrates an enormous range of material, from the placement of manuscript initials, to the 1129 reinstatement of the feast of the Conception of Our Lady in England, to Wace’s typical sentence structures and metrical habits, to the implications of the differing amounts of direct speech he employs (both within his own works and in comparison to his sources). At times the level of detail can become a bit overwhelming, and there is a certain amount of repetition, since she goes through the same process for each of the works in turn—discussing manuscripts, sources, and contexts, and explicating structure, compositional processes, style, and content. Not all the connections adduced are equally compelling, but Le Saux does an admirable job of illuminating Wace’s narrative techniques of strategic repetition or reversal of significant words and scenarios, and subtle revision (and selective omission) of his carefully researched source material. An overabundance of patiently accumulated evidence is a vice more scholarly works could afford to display.

In this portrait of the working methods and interests of a busy cleric, ‘an intermediary between two cultural groups’ (4), Le Saux convincingly depicts Wace as a poet in full command of his craft as versifier, scholar, compiler, and translator, eager to make his work pleasurable, accessible, and meaningful to his secular audience, but unwilling substantively to distort his source material to serve as a mere propagandist. She argues that the scholarly integrity she finds evidenced in the Roman de Rou may—if the king was expecting a thorough whitewashing of his ancestors—have played a role in Wace’s loss of the favor of Henry II, and she concludes that although in modern scholarship Wace has often been valued mostly as a forerunner to writers of romance, especially Chrétien de Troyes, he played an important role as scholar and historiographer and contributed to the broader rise of vernacular writing as an intellectually respectable enterprise.

This meticulous, judicious, thorough, and clearly written book will be the natural starting point for anyone embarking on study of any of Wace’s works, but it will also be very helpful to scholars of Anglo-Norman culture, translation, and...