Chanter de geste: l’art épique et son rayonnement. Hommage à Jean-Claude Vallecalle by Marylène Possamaï-Perez et Jean-René Valette (review)

This volume of twenty-nine essays is mostly focused on Jean-Claude Vallecalle’s area of research interest, the Old French epic and its extension into Franco-Italian versions in northern Italy. Many of them also reference implicitly or explicitly Vallecalle’s major work on messengers and ambassadors in Old French epic, including Roger Bellon on messengers in the Roman de Renart, Leslie Zarker Morgan on female messengers in French and Franco-Italian poems, Bernard Ribémont on the embassy as an act of war in Otinel, and François Suard on Bertrand’s embassy in La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche. The one oddity among the contributions is a short poem entitled Brou, in which Philibert II of Savoy delivers a mystical monologue from his tomb in the royal abbey. The contributors are all French, or working in France, except for one, Leslie Zarker Morgan, so it is regrettable that the table of contents and running head misrepresent her name as ‘Morgan-Zarker’. It is all the more regrettable since the volume as a whole is very well produced, with virtually no other misprints. Within the strict compass of the epic the range of topics and poems dealt with is broad, including the use of the spring opening (reverdie) in epic, the marvellous in Huon de Bordeaux, proleptic devices in epic, the opening lines of La Chanson de Roland, the status of gate-keepers in epic poems, and linguistic features of the Franco-Italian Berta da li pè grandi. Several relate to another of Vallecalle’s interests: the divine and Christian supernatural in epic. The contributions that do not deal directly with epic nevertheless reference the genre in their discussions. The most distant from the announced theme of the volume is the section of Marylène Possamaï-Perez’s article dealing with the poetry of Charles d’Orléans, in which metaphors drawn from arms, armour, and warfare are deemed to be epic, although the formulations in the poems do not obviously reference the formulaic diction of chansons de geste. Equally tangential is the contribution of the other editor, Jean-René Valette, who seeks to define Perlesvaus as an ‘epic romance’ on the basis of its concentration on violence. All the contributions, whether directly on the epic or not, are of a uniformly high standard: none of them has the air of being produced merely to fill the pages of a Festschrift, but all make a positive contribution to research on Old and Middle French literature and on its extension into Franco-Italian and Italian. The volume is completed by a biographical appreciation of the dedicatee, a bibliography of his writings to 2012, with a section on works in press, and a very usable index of the medieval authors and works discussed.