Poetry of Charles d’Orléans and his Circle: A Critical Edition of BnF ms. fr 25458, Charles d’Orléans’s Personal Manuscript (review)

This huge and long-awaited volume has a strong claim to be the definitive edition of the French-language poetry of Charles d’Orléans. Its philological precision and rich contextual detail, as well as its collaborative production, reflect the recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Charles’s work — most notably Mary-Jo Arn’s The Poet’s Notebook (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), a groundbreaking study of BnF MS fr. 25458. A multi-authored Introduction encapsulates the range of issues of which this edition will improve both scholarly and general understanding. Besides providing a helpful biographical summary, Arn pulls off the difficult task of outlining succinctly the manuscript’s gradual production and noting the discrepancies between the order of the poems’ composition and that of their presentation. The manuscript’s uniqueness, as both a social and a poetic document, emerges clearly from this account; readers requiring fuller codicological information are referred to The Poet’s Notebook, which many specialists will doubtless use as a companion volume to the edition. John Fox supplies an illuminating section on narrative and verse forms, with particularly helpful reflections on the vexed relationship between the chancon and rondel forms, and some notes on Charles’s language that are squarely aimed at non-specialists. Stephanie Kamath’s contribution is a survey of the formal, thematic, and intertextual contexts of Charles’s work; newcomers to the field will find this a valuable introduction to Middle French poetics in general. Barton Palmer’s translations rightly attend to semantic rather than formal features, but effectively reflect Charles’s distinctive style in their drive towards concision and their admixture of mild archaisms and breezy colloquialisms. Texts are based directly on Charles’s manuscript; the editors wisely avoid providing variants from other witnesses, which would blur the picture they have striven so successfully to reproduce. That picture is not of BnF MS fr. 25458 as it currently stands, but of ‘something like the order in which it was composed’ (p. lxii); this facilitates different possible modes of reading, as Arn points out (p. xxvii). Fox’s texts often present readings that diverge from Pierre Champion’s versions (the standard scholarly reference for decades), particularly in respect of refrains in the chancon and rondel. Textual notes and a well-judged glossary are complemented by appendices; these include useful pen-pictures of the other authors represented in the manuscript (many of whom are little known even to specialists) and a set of explanatory notes that are deployed sparingly, stimulating readers to engage with the poems rather than swamping them with exegesis. Indeed, attentiveness to the needs of readers is one of the edition’s salient features. Thanks not only to Barton Palmer’s translations, but also to the overall accessibility of the commentary and other apparatus, the volume lends itself easily to use by students, medievalists in other disciplines, and non-medievalist historians of poetry. At the same time, it will be indispensable to scholars of fifteenth-century poetry for the foreseeable future.