The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200–1400 by Maureen Barry McCann Boulton (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The potential for hypertext in the editing ofChaucer or any other writer is enormous. But like any other textual critical activity, electronic editing is itself a hermeneutic gesture that identifies true and complete data only by contingency. I am therefore puzzled by the assertion that because "cladistics 'sees' all the data, it will not be drawn into misleading reconstructions on the basis of parts of the data only" (p. 65). Yet I think all Chaucerians should welcome the Canterbury Tales Project, ifnot because the potential of achieving its very traditional aims is any more absolutely realizable than it was for Skeat or Tyrwhitt then because the twentieth-century work that the project itselfconstitutes will be interesting, useful, and carefully done. TIM WILLIAM MACHAN Marquette University MAUREEN BARRY McCANN BoULTON. The Song in the Story: Lyric Imer­ tiom in French Narrative Fiction, 1200-1400. Middle Ages Series. Phila­ delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Pp. xv, 327. $39.95. Maureen Boulton treats a rich body of French narratives with lyric inser­ tions that date from the early thirteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. She includes both poetic and prose works which have one or more inserted lyrics that could potentially stand alone. Many such lyrics, at least those in the thirteenth-century works, were composed independently and had al­ ready had a literary life. Boulton finds the practice of lyric insertion a "peculiarly French phenomenon" (p. 1), which seems approximately true for the time in question, though one might certainly add Boccaccio's De­ cameron and Filocolo, and doubtless others, to Dante's Vita Nuova, the one Italian example she finds (n. 1). Boulton organizes her discussion according to seven different relations that the lyrics have to the narratives: some are relatively independent of the story, others directly involved in it; in some the poet is a lyric commentator, in others the lover speaking for himself; some lyrics are objective and descriptive, others dialogical; some mainly function as story dividers. The whole poems themselves constitute a fas­ cinating set of narratives, and Boulton's approach provides a fine way to bring out their "diegetic" character, but it is less satisfactory for dealing with their lyric and formal nature. Like other scholars, Boulton presentsJean Renart's Guillaume de Dole (or 178 REVIEWS Roman de la Rose) as the originator ofthe device oflyric insertion. She does not mention precedents like the Latin prosimetrum (Boethius, Martianus Capella, Bernard Silvestris, Alan of Lille), though it is clear that Jean Re­ nart's influential innovations drew inspiration from various models and that later works that used lyric insertions also made use of models outside the central line ofthe tradition. Even in French narrative it is probable that Galeran de Bretagne preceded the Guillaume de Dole, as Boulton acknowl­ edges (pp. 120-21 n. 4). The contribution of Boulton's book is surely important in bringing to­ gether the French works, associating them in significant ways, and supply­ ing interesting and relatively full reports oftheir narrative content and how the lyrics integrate in the story. It also often provides insight into various other aspects of the works: authorship, form, critical problems, use of music, and so on. Her discussion of these aspects, however, is uneven and often completely lacking. I mainly miss consistent attention to the lyrics as potentially independent pieces and to the lyrical nature of the narratives themselves, which is often a salient feature. Boulton gives precedence to the narrative role ofthe lyrics in followingJakobson's taxonomy and classi­ fying them according to their role within the stories: at one end are those which have a communicative function within the story; at the other are insertions whose lyricity is more prominent and mainly act as dividers of the narrative. Boulton's conclusion shows rather belatedly that she has considered most relevant aspects of the lyric insertions. At the end of the book she refers summarily to the generally circular nature of lyric as com­ pared with the linear movement of narrative, the problem of authorship of the insertions, the nature and origin of the refrain type, the matter of singing as against recitation, and the lyric nature of the...