La Vie de saint Alexis en ancien français by Maurizio Perugi (review)

The decasyllabic Vie de saint Alexis has often been claimed as one of the earliest landmarks of French literature. The twelfth-century English copy of the Life contained in Hildesheim, Dombibliothek, MS St Godehard 1 (L), though almost certainly not the ‘original’, is the earliest known version of the French work. Studied for its philological interest as well as for its literary qualities and historical significance, the text has appeared in over thirty complete or partial editions. By contrast, there have been comparatively few translations of it into modern European languages, including French; those that exist do not always present the translation alongside the Old French text. This facing-page translation of the Vie de saint Alexis by Maurizio Perugi and Valérie Fasseur therefore addresses a gap in the market for an accessible but scholarly modern French version of this important work. Perugi’s first edition of the Vie de saint Alexis appeared in 2000 and was later revised and expanded for republication (Geneva: Droz, 2000Geneva: Droz, 2014). This 2017 edition/translation largely reproduces the text of Perugi’s 2014 edition. As Perugi’s earlier editions have already been subject to review, I largely confine my remarks to an assessment of this volume as a facing-page translation. Certain features of Perugi’s editorial approach should nonetheless be highlighted. Perugi’s editions of the Vie de saint Alexis use L as a base, while taking a different view of the manuscript tradition from other editors. Perugi accordingly proposes a later date for the L redaction: he argues that this vernacular version was composed in the mid-twelfth century (1156–57), but made to appear older through the use of archaic spellings and other stylistic and formal choices. Perugi’s Introduction to this latest edition/translation summarizes many arguments he has made more fully in earlier publications, offering an account of the legend’s development, of its adaptation in langue d’oïl, of the status and dating of the L version, and of questions of versification and characterization. The scholarship on display in the Introduction speaks for itself and there is a good deal of useful contextual information provided. However, given the less specialist reader that the inclusion of a facing-page translation presumes, a more pedagogical approach in the Introduction might sometimes have been desirable. Perugi’s arguments about important questions of dating might in particular have benefited from a greater degree of basic contextualization. When it comes to the translation, this is a consistently reliable rendering of the Old French, and follows some widely accepted conventions: the poem is translated into prose that respects modern French usage (including the normalization of tenses). Fasseur’s note on the translation indicates that the source text’s use of repetition has been avoided unless this forms part of the medieval author’s emulation of epic techniques. On the whole, such techniques are effectively translated, although in one or two instances what appear to be deliberate verbal echoes in the source are not replicated in the modern French version (for example, strophes 48–49). The notes to the translation offer valuable textual commentary, identifying intertextual links and generic conventions, some of which are explored in the Introduction. This volume makes Perugi’s 2014 edition and its intervention into scholarly debate on the Vie de saint Alexis accessible to a non-specialist audience. While a more thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the prefatory material would have enhanced this work’s usefulness as a teaching text, it is a valuable contribution to the bibliography of materials available to students of Old French.