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  • Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine médiévale: autour du Tournoi de Chauvency (ms Oxford Bodl. Douce 308) par Mireille Chazan et Nancy Freeman Regalado
  • Elizabeth Eva Leach
Lettres, musique et société en Lorraine médiévale: autour du Tournoi de Chauvency (ms Oxford Bodl. Douce 308). Actes réunis et édités par Mireille Chazan et Nancy Freeman Regalado. (Publications romanes et françaises, 240). Genève: Droz, 2012. 584 pp., ill.

This edited volume is a wonderful addition to the published scholarly work on Jacques Bretel’s poem, the Oxford manuscript as a whole, and the sociocultural aspects of Lorraine, specifically of Metz, in the later Middle Ages. Its twenty-two essays, emanating from a conference that the volume might make anyone wish they had attended, are arranged in four sections, divided in pairs around a number of colour illuminations of the manuscript (nice to have, but not strictly necessary, since they are all available online). The first section, on Douce 308 itself, contains two essays on one of the manuscript’s other contents, the Vœux du paon (with Michel Margue implicitly disagreeing with Jean-Marie Privat on the symbolism of the peacock), and two essays on the illuminations, including a compelling and well-illustrated discussion by Alison Stones proposing identities for both artists who worked on the manuscript. In addition, Mary Atchison offers reflections on links between the Tournoi, which quotes many song texts, and the songs in the Chansonnier section of Douce 308, arguing that the overlap is more pronounced for the other surviving complete version of the Tournoi than for the one in Douce 308. The second section’s focus shifts to Bretel’s Tournoi itself, an eyewitness account of courtly festivities encompassing jousting, games, tourney (strictly only the mêlée part of the armed events), dancing, and other dramatic performances with singing. Michel Parisse’s contribution traces the origins and development of the chivalric tournament; essays by Jean-Christophe Blanchard and Silvère Ménégaldo examine the pivotal role of heralds in the highly developed heraldry descriptions (and their depictions in the often more accurate illuminations), and Ménégaldo additionally considers the figure of the minstrels, since Bretel identifies himself as one. This section also treats the culture within which the manuscript was preserved, that of the Gronnais family in Metz, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The third section considers the musical resonances of the Tournoi in a manuscript entirely without musical notation but a significant source for music history nonetheless. Ardis Butterfield’s excellent summary of the musical [End Page 244] contexts of the refrains in the Tournoi shows important links to motet texts copied within Douce 308 and elsewhere. Three contributions, by Eglal Doss-Quinby, Robert Lug, and Gérard Le Vot, contextualize Douce 308 within the corpus of trouvère chansonniers, the last two specifically considering the similarly Messine volume, trouvère C (Switzerland, Bern, Stadtbibl. MS 389). The final section contains Anne Azéma’s reflections on her performative engagement with the poem, which she presented through sung and narrated texts at a concert during the course of the conference and subsequently recorded on CD (Le Tournoi de Chauvency: une joute d’amour en Lorraine médiévale, Ensemble Aziman, (K617 197, 2007)). Overall, this is a thoroughly stimulating volume, of interest to those working on the later Middle Ages, whether in musicology, French literature, art history, or the history of the book.

Elizabeth Eva Leach
St Hugh’s College, Oxford
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