L'Offrande du coeur: Medieval and Early Modern Studies in Honour of Glynnis Cropp (review)

Compiled in honour of Emeritus Professor Glynnis Cropp from Massey University, L'Offrande du coeur unites a broad, if eclectic, array of essays in medieval French and Occitan studies. The 'honorary' collection is not an enterprise often undertaken in Oceania. That this one has been produced is testimony both of the esteem in which Professor Cropp is held, and also of the collegial and international flavour of research in Old French. The volume, however, should not be read as representative of the entire field, though it amply suggests the variety of Cropp's own research interests. Nor is it useful as such a representative, given the almost interdisciplinary scope of its contents. Rather, it supplies the reader with snatches of research from scholars working with French materials, where the editing of such materials is often a primary concern.

The collection demands a working knowledge of both modern and old French to be thoroughly appreciated. Liliane Dulac's opening essay is the only essay in the volume to be published entirely in French, and is the first of four essays by pre-eminent scholars focusing on Christine de Pizan, to whom Cropp has devoted a significant proportion of her own research, and to whom a majority of this volume is devoted. With 'innovation' an increasing preoccupation in Christine studies (both Christine's and those involved in studying her), Dulac has produced an serious yet engaging study of the previously unexamined role of laughter in Christine's oeuvre, which systematically isolates references to mirth both joyous and malicious in a range of Christine's works, and points to the author's awareness of it as a marker of social and even political status. Angus J. Kennedy's essay focuses on Christine's re-imagining of the body politic image. It once again brings Christine's innovation to the fore, but also serves as a reminder of the importance of contextualizing Christine's social views. James Laidlaw shifts the focus on Christine back to a courtly setting, and examines the author's skill as a lyric poet in her Livre de Cristine. A fourth and final article on Christine by Nadia Margolis casts the author as a 'devourer of knowledge', and elucidates her encyclopaedism, which, she argues, 'validates, authorizes and innovates all modes of her discourse' (p. 54).

A fluently structured essay by J. Keith Atkinson shifts the attention of the collection to Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae. In highlighting problems of translation in medieval French interpretations of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, Atkinson exposes the shared concerns of modern editors of classical and medieval texts with medieval scribes. An article by Brian Merrilees offers a previously unprinted version of a philosophical tale originally in Latin, Le serf de mon serf, while Peter Ricketts also supplies an edited text, the fourteenth-century Priere de Theophile, comparing the original old French version with an Occitan translation in the same MS, which is complete with critical apparatus and notes on the text. A complex paper by Roy Rosenstein continues the focus on Old Occitan, assessing the various definitions of the fictitious debate tensó through a critical appraisal of nineteenth-century scholarship on the subject.

Alison Hanham's intriguing essay takes the collection away from the continent, to reconsider the authorship of an early French-English phrasebook printed by Caxton. Hanham puts forward a convincing argument to support a young Caxton – previously dismissed as an unlikely candidate – as the translator of this error-smattered textbook. The most philosophical paper in the collection is Denis Drysdall's examination of crane imagery in the Parergon iuris libri duodecim (Twelve Books of Asides from the Law) as an emblem of prudence in learning, which he relates to modern historical inquiry. Drysdall concludes with the statement that scholarly dialogue and peer-review systems are indispensable in reaching 'agreed positions...