Treize miracles de Notre-Dame tirés du Ms. B.N. fr. 2094 ed. by Pierre Kunstmann (review)

1 dimension et organisation du texte de chaque manuscrit; 2 place de la chanson dans le(s) manuscrit(s), indication de I'auteuret musique; 3 c1assement des manuscrits et authenticite de la chanson; 4 ~tablissement du texte et corrections; 5 versification et schema melodique; 6 interpretation du textei 7 precedentes editions de la chanson. (P 26) The technical terms used in the notices, in the discussion of versification, are defined here. They are borrowed from Lerond and Malke. Parts of many of the poems are indeed very difficult and the reader is grateful for the frequent translations of complete lines and even strophes found in section 6 of several notices. The poems are followed by a glossary, tables of names and of rhymes, first lines, and a bibliography. This edition is thorough and complete. It will benefit researcher, instructor, and student alike. (FRANK COLLINS) Pierre Kunstmann, editor. Treize miracles de Notre-Dame tires du Ms. B.N. fro 2094 University of Ottawa Mediaeval Texts and Studies, 6 Editions de l'Universite d'Ottawa. 140. $5.25 paper Pierre Kunstmann's edition presents thirteen 'Miracles de Notre-Dame' found in B.N. fro 2094, which also contains twenty-eight of the thirty-two stories which, since the work of E. Schwan, have been known as the second Vie des Peres. All that can be said olthe author is that he was a cleric writing at the bidding of his superior (miracle VI, lines 23-32) and that he wrote around 1300 in the Burgundian dialect. These short texts, constituting a total of only 1971 lines, are rather unsophisticated reworkings of elements from popular literature, but as such, Kunstrnann tells us, they are of particular interest for students of medieval folklore and mythology. In the introduction the editor provides us with a brief resume of each miracle, followed in each case by information concerning other extant versions, in verse or in prose, published or unpublished, in Latin or in French. Within these brief resumes the editor parenthetically identifies the main narrative situations of each miracle according to his schemati2ation of the basic sequences of a 'Miracle de Notre-Dame': SN /~ UT UR Si/ ~RM/ ~Sf 408 LETIERS IN CANADA 1981 UT (Univers Trouble) et UR (Univers Retabli) constituants immediats de Sequence Narrative (SN), constitues eux-memes des symboles Si (Situation initiale) + R (Rupture) et de M (Miracle) + Sf (Situation finale); ces derniers ne sont pas n~cessairement terminaux, car ils peuvent correspondre Aune SN enchassee et done s'analyser en UT + UR. (p 3) Readers already initiated into the practice of recent narratology may find this schematization brief to the point of simplification, while for the uninitiated it may be too brief to be helpful. Kunstmann does, however, provide some important references for those who would pursue this approach further. Curiously these do not explicitly include the works of A.J. Greimas. Kunstmann's description of his manuscripts is a model. His basic manuscript, A, is B.N. fro 2094. He has also consulted manuscript B, McLean '78, Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge, and manuscript C, Carpentras 106. In establishing the text the editor has avoided what he calls the dangerous and often gratuitous practice of correcting in order to produce the requisite number of syllables per line, and he has made only those corrections ofspelling, unsatisfactory rhymes, and vague meanings that are necessary for the convenience of the modem reader. These corrections, along with the notes, glossary, and bibliography, make this edition quite accessible to the non-specialist reader. The glossary is selective, excluding all words found in Greimas's Dictionnaire d'ancien fran~ais with the same spelling and meaning. In his philological discussion of the texts Kunstrnann has two rubrics: 'Langue de l'auteur' and 'Langue du scribe.' The evidence for authorial particularities is limited to what can be provided by rhyming pairs, and thus it is the discussion of the scribe's language that constitutes the more thorough linguistic analysis. It is here that one might wish for more frequent and more developed observations as to what is typically Burgundian about a given phenomenon. While this would not replace the reader's careful consultation of cited works from the...