L’Art de la philologie: Mélanges en l’honneur de Leena Löfstedt (review)

The 24 impeccably scholarly papers in this fine volume reflect and build on the achievements of the Finnish Latinist and Romanist to whom it is dedicated. The breadth of her interests (revealed in the extensive publication list provided as an appendix) accounts for the correspondingly wide range of the contributions: ‘philology’ in the broadest sense. Not surprisingly in view of this, the editors do not attempt a synthesis in their brief Introduction, which essentially focuses on Leena Löfstedt’s distinguished career. Most of the articles relate directly to aspects of language, notably grammar: Old French verb forms used for instructions in recipe collections (A. Englebert); adpositions in Romance and Finno-Ugric (I. Piechnik); extensions to the use of the accusative in the Latin of the Empire (H. Solin); the role of ja in Old French rhetorical questions (O. Välikangas). But there are also articles on Occitan toponymy (J.-P. Chambon), cohesion and co-reference in a Middle French text (B. Combettes), mistranslations relating to the early history of the Turin Shroud (P. Dembowski), early scribal practice and vernacular Romance forms (B. Frank-Job), etymology and lexicology (P. Flobert on tutare/tuer, M. Iliescu on parallel French influences in English and Rumanian, G. Roques on regionalisms in the medieval French translation of the Decretum Magistri Gratiani and the light they shed on its authorship, S. Nevanlinna on pigeons, doves and turtles in Middle English vocabulary), logic and semantics (H. Rosén on unwarranted substitutions of sed for et by editors of Latin texts, M. Tuţescu on the de re/de dicto distinction). Elsewhere, textual criticism is the focus: B. De Marco and J. Craddock present an edition of unpublished fourteenth-century miracle tales by Petrus Calò, T. Matsumura gives an incisive critique of Janice Pinder’s edition of the Vie de saint François d’Assise, W. Paden analyses the oldest surviving (tenth-century) Occitan literary documents, while Anglo-Norman texts are the concern of E. Schulze-Busacker, who is informative about the didactic and hagiographical poet Chardri (his real name may well have been Richard!), and D. Trotter, with his spirited rehabilitation of the legal treatise known as the Mirror of Justices. Linking Germanic philology and anthropology is W. Mańczak’s polemical refutation of the theory that the Goths originated in Scandinavia. Finally, we enter the domain of social history with perhaps the most colourful of the various papers: A. Bochnakowa’s delightful analysis of a seventeenth-century multilingual phrase-book for travellers; J. & E. S. Härmä’s entertaining account of the splendidly fulsome dedications and tributes that often accompanied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century doctoral dissertations; O. Merisalo’s unusual glimpse into the personal lives of nineteenth-century scholars through letters sent by the German palaeographer Ludwig Traube to the Finnish philologist Werner Söderhjelm. Most of the papers are in French, six are in English and there is one in German. As no abstracts are provided in any language, the remaining paper (in Swedish) about the extent to which Horace and other classical Latin authors were aware of the realities of northern Europe (T. Pekkanen) was, sadly, largely opaque to the present reviewer.