Songe du Viel Pelerin by Philippe de Mézières (review)

The Songe du Viel Pelerin is the magnum opus of a fourteenth-century polymath who grappled passionately with the political and spiritual crises of his age. The compass of Philippe de Mézières’s commitments — he was, among other things, a diplomat who consorted with kings and popes, a crusade propagandist and an advocate for peace in the west, and a well-travelled man of the world with a mystic bent and a utopian programme for the moral and institutional reformation of Christendom — bespeaks the range of scholarly interests to which his work appeals, especially since the Songe intrinsically demands the kind of transnational perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches increasingly favoured in medieval studies. Joël Blanchard and his collaborators have thus served a large constituency by replacing G. W. Coopland’s edition of BnF MS fr. 22542 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) with this new edition based on the older and more reliable text of Arsenal MSS 2682–83, with variants. A well-curated glossary is provided; non-specialists and teachers are referred to Blanchard’s separate modern French translation (Songe du Vieux Pèlerin (Paris: Pocket, 2008)). The Songe, however, is a challenging text less for linguistic than for structural reasons. Sprawling, serpentine, and heterogeneous, it uses the flexible rhetorical resources of the late medieval dream vision to elaborate a system of nested allegories, with each of its three books introducing a different master trope: the ‘good coinage’ of virtue and justice (derived from the parable of the talents), the ship or chariot of the French state, and the chess board on which Truth plots the elements of her advice to the young King Charles VI. These allegorical frames organize didactic disquisitions that draw on and connect with a daunting variety of medieval discourses. Blanchard prepares the reader to navigate Mézières’s maze with an erudite Introduction that situates the Songe in its historical, cultural, and literary contexts by considering the text from a series of thematic angles. On more specific points, helpful endnotes collate the Songe with its sources and identify references to contemporary political actors, places, and events. Unfortunately, however, there are no indications in the text as to which details are elucidated in the endnotes, all of which are inconveniently located at the back of the second volume. Indeed, ease of use is the one important criterion by which this otherwise first-rate edition does not excel. Readers taking up Blanchard’s invitation to consult his modern French translation will find cross-referencing difficult because the translation, unlike this edition, retains Coopland’s chapter divisions. Far more problematically, there is neither an analytical chapter-by-chapter summary nor a breakdown of the Songe (apart from the prolix and idiosyncratic one included, over eighty-four pages, in the medieval text itself), nor even a reasonably detailed table of contents that would make it possible to locate the manuscript’s numbered ‘rebriches’ [rubrics]. Although good indexes are included, these amenities’ omission from a text of the Songe ’s already unwieldy length and complexity is surprising and frustrating. Blanchard’s edition remains, however, a monumental achievement that will facilitate further critical engagement with the many facets of Mézières’s masterwork.