The Medieval French Pastourelle Tradition: Poetic Motivations and Generic Transformations (review)

For this most complete study of the French pastourelle in recent memory, Geri Smith has revised her 1998 University of Pennsylvania doctoral thesis to impressive advantage. Her introduction discusses previous attempts to define this complex, misunderstood genre, suggesting that, particularly in early pastourelle interpretations, the predominantly male critical voice governed modern reading of these texts just as the male poetic voice did their appreciation by medieval audiences — although the medieval authors, one gleans from Smith, were arguably more ingenious. Chapten surveys the foundational thirteenth-century pastourelle's structure and socioliterary context, revealing the gender-class power relationship between sexually predatory knight and helpless shepherdess as less predictable than the stereotypical aristocratic male's rustic rape fantasy. Each of the ensuing chapters closely examines a major author, ranging from about 1275 to 1403: Adam de la Halle, Jean Froissart, and Christine de Pizan. Chapter 3 analyses how, in Adam's innovative pastourelle rendering for the theatre (Jeu de Robin et Marion) — a shift from lyric page to centre stage — the shepherdess's persona benefits: Marion not only resists but even subverts the knight's authority by sheer verbal prowess. Froissart's examples (Chapter 4) return us to lyric, but this time marked by the chronicler's consciousness: for him, the pastoral domain affords a new avenue for sociohistorical commentary. Though a true courtier, he displays unusual sympathy for the poor and powerless. Froissart genuinely attempts, at least once (pastourelle 8), to tell the abandoned shepherdess's side of the story, thereby promoting her to courtly lady. But in 'gentrifying' the genre, he has also deprived the female voice of her new-found, verbally confident autonomy so striking in Adam's Marion — because of Froissart's dedication to praising and preserving the old chivalric order. Christine de Pizan (Chapter 5), though sharing many of Froissart's conservative views, in Dit de la pastoure elegantly yet trenchantly everts the structure of this genre's inherent debasement of women, focusing not merely on the woman's side as a kindly aristocratic matron, but as the shepherdess herself, based on shared gender and lived misfortune. Also like Christine, however, poor Marote and her confidante Lorete are remarkably learned and articulate: love's losers, yet poetry's victors. Smith rightly situates each author's pastourelles within his or her entire œuvre to highlight continuities and departures. If, in emphasizing each author's deliberate generic transformation and hybridization as subtexts to the poems themselves, she especially reflects the influence of her mentor, Kevin Brownlee, she carefully incorporates all other scholarship too, with admirable balance, while contributing abundant original insight, whether in broad assessment or nuanced detail. Smith's readable, engaging style exhibits critical and theoretical precision without obfuscating jargon. Other virtues: meticulous, though non-cumbersome, footnotes and a very complete bibliography. The otherwise useful index lacks key topics such as 'clothing', 'feminism', or 'rape', which merit entries; except for 'Delaney' instead of Delany, no other errors were detected.