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  • Les Versions en prose du ‘Purgatoire de Saint Patrice’ en ancien français ed. by Martina Di Febo
  • Keith Busby
Les Versions en prose du ‘Purgatoire de Saint Patrice’ en ancien français. Édition critique, introduction et notes publiées par Martina Di Febo. (Classiques français du Moyen Âge, 172). Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. 296 pp.

The Latin Tractatus de purgatorio sancti Patricii was enormously popular in the Middle Ages (over one hundred and fifty manuscripts survive). Numerous adaptations were also made in various vernaculars, the best known of which is certainly that attributed to Marie de France, made within a few years of the Latin original (c. 1190). Martina Di Febo here presents and edits three French versions in prose dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century (a), the middle of the fourteenth (a1), and the first half of the fourteenth (e). Versions b and f are omitted as being less innovative and adhering more slavishly to the Tractatus. The general introduction to the volume is a thorough presentation of the fate of the Tractatus in the French vernacular and is exhaustively documented. Differences between the Latin and various French texts in prose are explained with exemplary clarity. The three versions are edited separately, with detailed descriptions of the manuscript witnesses and the relationships between them. The presentation of the texts is also remarkable for the attention paid to the manuscript contexts. Version a, for example, is transmitted in thirty-three manuscripts, many of which are collections of saints’ lives (légendiers) made for monastic use. After some painstaking textual analysis, Di Febo produces an old-fashioned stemma of the manuscripts of a that will please philologists who admire the Italian tradition of editing. The relative brevity of the texts allows for a lengthy critical apparatus. In the case of a, for example, the text runs to twenty-two pages, the variants and interpolations to twenty-three pages of smaller type, and the critical notes to another eleven of the same small font. Each introduction also contains a section on the phonetics, morphology, and syntax of the individual texts. The principles of the editions are carefully explained. The volume ends with a joint glossary to the three texts, a list of proper names, and an exhaustive bibliography. These editions of some fascinating texts leave little to be desired and ought to stimulate further interest in the vernacular versions of the story of Saint Patrick’s Purgatory.

Keith Busby
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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