Mise en roman et mise en image: les manuscrits du ‘Roman d’Alexandre en prose’ by Maud Pérez-Simon (review)

The text studied by Maud Pérez-Simon is a generally faithful prose translation from the early thirteenth century of the Latin Historia de preliis, a long and detailed life of Alexander the Great. Pérez-Simon studies the fifteen surviving manuscripts of the Roman d’Alexandre, which range in date from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. She reflects on the relationship between word and image, and on the manner in which the individual manuscripts collectively sketch the reception history of the text. Pérez-Simon grounds her examination in a thorough consideration of the history of the earlier Greek and Latin versions of the text, as well as underpinning the whole study in the theory of semiotics and reception history. The book is clearly written and organized, perhaps betraying its origin as a 2008 thesis from the Sorbonne-Nouvelle but none the worse for that. Pérez-Simon analyses in turn the text, the illuminations, and the manuscripts as Gesamtkunstwerke, with particular attention to the interaction of their verbal and visual elements. Although the Roman d’Alexandre en prose retains the structure of the Historia de preliis, the subtle modifications made to the Latin (minor reorganization, additions, omissions) transform it into something more akin to a romance. The same movement is perceptible in the ‘medievalization’ of the classical world through the attribution of chivalric and courtly sentiments and, for example, the manner in which combats are presented. It is clear that illuminators worked at least partly from standard programmes of images, details and locations of which they modified in varying degrees. These visual programmes also constitute a form of translation for the intended readership of the manuscripts (and we are here principally dealing with readers rather than listeners). The images reflect textual and rhetorical procedures, joining forces with the text to manipulate reader response. Pérez-Simon’s work will satisfy both textual scholars and art historians: in addition to the close reading of a philologist, she takes into consideration not only the style and content of the images, but also their size, frequency, placement, and relation with tables of contents, where present. There are detailed analyses of individual manuscripts, which result in a kind of codicological typology (and which might perhaps have been compared more extensively with other traditions). The book closes with useful appendices listing all illuminations in all manuscripts, and an exhaustive bibliography. Numerous reproductions, in black and white and in colour, support the arguments. Some of the colour photographs are excessively blue in tint, but Pérez-Simon has usefully (and, one suspects, of necessity) supplemented the in-text photographs with line drawings. This is an excellent case study of a text that is rarely read these days. Drawing on a conviction, now almost universal, that manuscripts and manuscript context are crucial to our understanding of medieval literary culture, it provides one model, among others, for further studies of its kind.