The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature (review)

Readers familiar with Simon Gaunt's and Sarah Kay's re-readings of genre, for instance Kay's The Chanson de Geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford UP, 1995) challenging the importance attached to the Chanson de Roland, may not be surprised to find that work as the subject of the first chapter. However, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval French Literature proposes balanced treatment of the indisputably canonical (such as the Roland), the widely taught (Marie de France, Aucassin et Nicolette), and topics of recent innovatory research (Christine de Pizan, Perceforest, saints' lives). Abjuring ambitions towards a comprehensive history of medieval French literature, it proposes instead to collect innovative critical approaches. As such it represents an incisive (if not necessarily complete) picture of the current state of the discipline, and suggests possibilities for future endeavors. Indeed, Jane Gilbert's essay on the Roland exemplifies the best the collection has to offer. She situates the work's status within French national history, tracing its wartime use to galvanize French resistance in 1870 and the 1940s; rather than privilege the Oxford text she proposes a comparative reading of the seven different extant versions, considering the work's place in national (and international) memory using Pierre Nora's notion of lieu de mémoire. The essay is at once a thorough introduction to the Roland and to medieval textuality in general, as well as a critical contribution in its own right, productively applying psychoanalytical methodologies for a fresh look at a much-taught work. Something similar could be said of all sixteen essays in the volume.

The volume is divided into four sections, each with four essays treating a facet of a key disciplinary question. Part one, 'What is a medieval text?,' focuses on four complex textual traditions. Besides Gilbert's above-mentioned essay, Noah Guynn studies the highly popular and controversial Roman de la Rose, looking at how, rather than explaining its allegories as promised, the text deliberately remains open-ended, inviting inexhaustible discussion—both in its own time, and ours. Adrian Armstrong argues François Villon's satirical Testament can similarly confound both contemporary and modern readers attempting to understand its allusions. Analysis falters when a 'life-based' or 'art-based' approach is favored exclusively; appreciation must include both the work's conventionality and its eccentricities. Of particular interest to Arthurian scholars will be Peggy McCracken's essay on the sprawling (not yet entirely edited) Old French Vulgate Cycle. She suggests strategies for coping with the five-part prose work's digressive style, such as the notion of narrative 'interlace' and the use of prophecy as a technique of narrative forecasting. Chivalric violence, McCracken argues, is a key structure defining hierarchies of worth and also gender, but while it is normative, it also offers critiques of values from within the story itself. McCracken offers the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guenevere as the organizer of the narrative, defining the two other narrative threads: the religious history of the grail, and the history of Arthur's kingdom, tying the chivalric to sexual sin to privilege an alternative heavenly chivalry.

Part two asks, 'What is a medieval author?' Essays on Chrétien de Troyes by Matilda Bruckner, the Châtelain de Couci and the trouvères by Simon Gaunt, Guillaume de Machaut by Deborah McGrady, and Christine de Pizan by Marilynn Desmond show how four major authors construct themselves as such, eschewing anonymity in various ways. The essays on Machaut and Christine explore how these authors conscientiously manipulate the production of their manuscripts.

Part three asks, 'What is the value of genre for medieval French literature?' For Keith Busby, the more genre is defined, the more texts resist definition. He argues that manuscript codices implicitly suggest genre by the works they anthologize. Jane H.M. Taylor works to redeem the lyric poetry of the later Middle Ages from dismissal...