In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Mémoires
  • Irit Ruth Kleiman
Philippe de Commynes . Mémoires. 2 Vols. Textes Littéraires Français. Ed. Joël Blanchard. Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2007. clxxii + 1796 pp. + 16 color pls. index. illus. tbls. map. gloss. chron. bibl. CHF 175. ISBN: 978–2–600–01080–1.

The first critical edition of Philippe de Commynes's Mémoires was produced in 1552 by Denis Sauvage, French King Henri III's official historiographer. His self-pronounced rescue of Commynes from corrupted pages and foreign translations inaugurated a far-reaching project, one that sought to codify French national identity by systematically editing the works of its most important chroniclers. Since that time, each historical moment has produced its own edition of the Mémoires: Lenglet Dufresnoy in 1747, Mlle Dupont in 1840–47, then Bernard de Mandrot in 1901–03. Since 1925 scholars have relied on the text produced by Joseph Calmette and the Abbé Georges Durville based on the so-called Dobrée manuscript, but their work has been out of date for some time now. To make matters worse, the out-of-print volumes had become rarissime in recent years. French publishers sought to fill this void by introducing several popular editions. Yet the relative density of Commynes's text — referential, historical, and linguis-tic — means that even well-informed readers are often glad to have recourse to a sturdy critical apparatus. Specialists, scholars, and the educated reader thus have substantial reason to rejoice at the appearance of what is, beyond a doubt, the twenty-first century's epoch-marking edition of the Mémoires.

Like the earlier versions, Joël Blanchard's two-volume critical edition of the Mémoires forms part of an ambitious, multi-decade project. This project began with the publication of Commynes's correspondence (2001) and is to be completed when two further volumes containing archival documents emerge from the presses. This most recent edition represents an immense labor, one that fills 1,750 continuously numbered pages of densely formatted text, of which the eight books of the Mémoires themselves occupy only 736. The first volume contains a substantial introduction and the full text of the Mémoires. The second volume, substantially longer than the first, contains the ensemble of variants, notes, indices, etc., that give this edition its authority.

It is significant that Blanchard begins his introduction not with a discussion of Commynes or his oeuvre but with a list of manuscripts. Turning away from Calmette's fondness for the Dobrée text, Blanchard has returned to the Polignac manuscript edited by Mandrot. This manuscript has the unique advantage of containing both the six books concerning the reign of Louis XI and the later two written in response to Charles VIII's Italian War. Blanchard was also allowed to consult a manuscript held anonymously and heretofore inaccessible to researchers. He raises the number of extant manuscripts to nine from the previously accepted six, although there is a certain sleight of hand in this maneuver, since two remain known only through edited versions and a third is fragmentary.

Apart from the analysis of the manuscripts, the freshest and most provocative portion of Blanchard's introduction can be found in his analysis of the difficulties faced by sixteenth-century editors and scribes confronted with Commynes's syntax [End Page 1348] and vocabulary. These difficulties frequently resulted in noteworthy glosses and grammatical revisions of his words. Blanchard further condenses and revisits Commynes's biography, authorial craft, and fortunes. This account draws extensively on Blanchard's numerous existing studies of Commynes. A thematically organized bibliography in which archival series, Renaissance-era primary sources, and the regional publications of local scholarly societies all find their part, completes this introduction and prepares the reader for an entry into the prologue of the Mémoires.

Blanchard's only concession in presenting the text itself has been to preserve the divisions into sections and books first inherited from Sauvage and by now standard. Blanchard proceeds according to the most conservative editorial standards, inserting only punctuation and the minimum necessary accents. He uses brackets to signal the passage of manuscript folios and deviations from the lessons in the Polignac...

pdf

Share