Chartier in Europe (review)

This is a pitch-perfect moment to mark rising interest in Alain Chartier. James Laidlaw’s 1974 edition of Chartier’s poems and François Rouy’s 1980 edition of Livre de l’espérance have been joined in recent years by editions and translations of the Belle Dame sans mercy cycle, the Livre des quatre dames and the Quadrilogue invectif. Chartier’s texts have become more accessible in both their original Middle French and in modern French and English, and their greater circulation shows; Alain Chartier in Europe bears witness to deep critical engagement with this renowned but earlier-neglected author. Two of the essays in the volume offer close textual readings by the scholar-translators eminently qualified to give them. Florence Bouchet, whose excellent modern French translation of the Quadrilogue appeared in 2002, here details how Chartier uses biblical references in shaping the language of each character in the treatise; Bouchet argues that Chartier puts his own rhetorical skills at the service of the disenfranchised ‘Peuple’, with the larger purpose of using biblical authority to urge his compatriots to political unity. Barbara Altmann, co-translator of The Book of the Four Ladies, insightfully interprets the commonplaces of love debate poetry in the Livre des quatre dames as politically-charged allegory. Altmann invokes the lack of individuality in the figures of the four ladies to point to their allegorical import; Dana Symon’s contribution, a persuasive essay on proverbs in La Belle Dame sans mercy, similarly treats Chartier’s use of infinitely repeatable proverbial language – easily recognizable and yet ‘owned’ by no one - as an inquiry into the nature of meaning. Douglas Kelly’s nuanced account explores the Boethian model in Chartier’s Livre de l’esperance, a text that invokes faith rather than philosophy to provide consolation. Several essays rely on material as much as textual evidence to make their case. Joan Macrae helpfully lays out the components of the Belle Dame sans mercy cycle before homing in on manuscripts in which the cycle’s texts are presented in a different order; the individual quires that contain each text are key to Macrae’s study on how the manuscripts found their final form. Emma Cayley focusses on Latin and French manuscripts to show convincingly how they portray Chartier as both a worthy descendant of Latin auctores and a source authority for later French poets – roles equally important. Chartier’s fortunes outside of France occupy a substantial portion of this volume of European scope. Three essays examine Chartier in England and Scotland: Julia Boffey knowledgeably presents Chartier’s early reception across the Channel, William Calin calls on wide-ranging erudition to situate a sixteenth-century Scottish love debate in the tradition of the Belle Dame cycle, and Catherine Nall offers a cogent study of the relevance of the Quadrilogue invectif to English readers of the later fifteenth century. Along with Nall’s essay, those by Clara Pascual-Argente and Ashby Kinch offer deeply interesting looks at how Chartier’s work was interpreted and recast in translation, whether English, Spanish or Italian; all three of these pieces expand our horizons.