Le Chevalier au lion by Chrétien de Troyes (review)

Students of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier au lion who are now of a certain age will almost certainly have used at some stage the edition of this text that was published in 1960 by Mario Roques (Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes édités d'après la copie de Guiot (Bibl. nat. fr. 794), IV: Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain) (Paris: Honoré Champion)). This edition was based on BnF, MS fr. 794, known as the Guiot manuscript. In spite of a stream of criticism of Roques's edition on various fronts, no rival appeared until William W. Kibler's edition of the Guiot manuscript with a facing English translation (The Knight with the Lion, or Yvain (Le Chevalier au Lion) (New York: Garland, 1985)), followed by David F. Hult's edition of BnF, MS fr. 1443 (Le Chevalier au lion, ou, Le roman d'Yvain (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1994)). There has nevertheless long been a need for a new edition that is accompanied by a substantial amount of critical apparatus. Corinne Pierreville has responded excellently to this need. Her edition, based on the Guiot manuscript, contains an Introduction of 113 pages, a bibliography of eighteen pages (with more items in the various notes), twenty pages of variants, a forty-five-page glossary and an index of proper names; in all around two hundred pages of supporting material. The text itself, which is far more conservative than that of Roques and other editors, is accompanied by an accurate and elegant facing prose translation, with notes at the foot of the page. The Introduction leaves no stone unturned. The section on the language and versification of the Guiot manuscript, often missing or very restricted in length in modern bilingual editions, occupies thirty-seven pages and includes a five-page list of what are called Chrétien's 'singularités sémantiques' (p. 89). In other words, the editor has not skimped on any of the material that will provide the basis for future scholarship. The bibliography has a good balance between items in French and those in other languages, especially English, but it lacks a section devoted to volumes of a general nature that often contain substantial sections on Yvain. Examples of such volumes are L. T. Topsfield, Chrétien de Troyes: A Study of the Romances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Evelyn Mullally, The Artist at Work: Narrative Technique in Chrétien de Troyes (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), while Douglas Kelly's substantial introductory chapter 'Chrétien de Troyes' (in The Arthur of the French: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval French and Occitan Literature, ed. by Glyn S. Burgess and Karen Pratt (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 135–85) is also useful. I would have advocated keeping the short title Yvain in the title, as most other editors have done; but it is hard to find fault with this volume, which at a very reasonable price provides the wherewithal for future study of this pivotal romance.