Le lai de l'oiselet. An Old French poem of the thirteenth century: edition and critical study (review)

166 Reviews greatest influence on Chaucer, both through his own verse, and through that of Jean Froissart and Eustache Deschamps. Wimsatt conjectures that the two poets might have met at the siege of Reims in 1359-60, when Chaucer was captured by the French, or in 1360 during Chaucer's visit to Calais. He stops short of claiming that 'the old poet helped to capture the young one' (p. 78), but his speculation must remain inconclusive. Indeed, the suggestion of hypothetical personal encounters or pronouncements about such things as the mutual respect that would have blossomed between Chaucer and Deschamps had they ever had the chance of meeting (p. 272), seem out of place in this work which is often so careful in its attention to observable detail. Wimsatt is at his most convincing when he is looking closely at the likenesses between Chaucer and the French poets. In addition, he raises the point that Chaucer was a translator as well as a poet, and in discussing his translation of the work of Oton de Granson, suggests to the reader the way in which the translator becomes the poet in his adaptation of the original work, thereby underlining the power of the 'natural music'. In discussing Machaut and Deschamps, Jody Enders ('Music, delivery, and the rhetoric of memory in Guillaume de Machaut's Remede de Fortune', PMLA 107 (1992), 450-64) has looked independently at the 'music' of the French poets and argued for the place of memory in medieval poetic composition. Enders' emphasis on the training of the memory 'to which any learned medieval author would have been exposed in the trivium' (p. 451), might help us to comprehend Chaucer's response to, and influence on, the French poets which Wimsatt has presented so meticulously. Margaret Rogerson Department of English University of Sydney Wolfgang, Lenora D., ed., Le lai de Voiselet. An Old French poem of the thirteenth century: edition and critical study (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 80, part 5), Philadelphia, American Philosophical Society, 1990; pp. v, 129; R.R.P. US$25.00. This Old French poem, just over 400 octosyllabic couplets in length, was in need of a new edition if only to facilitate access to the text which has been published only once this century, by Raymond Weeks in 1927. Furthermore, Weeks had based his edition on a single manuscript offering in fact a simple transcription of the text of B .N. f.fr. 837. Fortunately, Wolfgang began her present work before she could be influenced by any of the eccentric 'New philology', abroad since the special edition of Speculum in 1990, and has presented the public with an excellent critical edition, based in the best traditions on a single manuscript and listing Reviews 167 rejected readings, but giving the reader access to the other readings by publishing, as an appendix, the other extant manuscripts as diplomatic texts. The fact that Wolfgang acknowledges the generous encouragement of William Roach, celebrated for his excellence in editing the Percevaltexts,gives promise from the start of the high quality of her work. Pages 23-33 of the work offer details of all manuscripts containing the Lai de I'oiselet, justify the choice of the base manuscript and list the editorial principles followed. Most welcome textual notes, covering different readings as well as philological commentary, occupy pp. 104-23, whilst a glossary with English equivalents of the Old French words glossed closes the work. The edition is of high quality indeed, quite worthy of inclusion in the prestigious Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Of equal interest is the 'Critical study' which precedes the edition, coupled with the full Bibliography. The Lai de I'oiselet ('Lay of the little bird') has fascinating connections with Barlaam et Josaphat and the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus, along with French works based on the Disciplina clericalis, principally the Chastoiement, the Donnei des amants, and the Trois savoirs. Wolfgang deals with these relationships in an exemplary and scholarly fashion. As the description of a beautiful orchard and spring is a feature of the Lai under discussion, she seesfitto look in detail at the thematic sources of the 'locus amoenus'. This section...