The Making of Poetry: Late-Medieval French Poetic Anthologies (review)

In a detailed study of manuscript collections of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century lyrics, Jane Taylor questions the reading practices of their audience and argues for a modern appreciation of the late-medieval lyric as product of a ‘complex network of people, materials and events’. While recognizing that the idea of the lyric as a social phenomenon is nothing new, Taylor builds on this, examining its codicological context and exploring the social and poetic interplay between lyrics in a range of selected anthology manuscripts. She draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, considering poetry, and the production and possession of written poetry, as ‘cultural capital’. The ‘habitus’, or skill, of the poet is his passport to social and financial success, while the ‘field’ in which he operates shapes and defines his output. Of considerably more interest, however, is Taylor’s exploration of the dynamics of lyric anthologies on a ‘metacommunicative’ level, where it is the implicit or explicit traces of social interaction between poems, writers, copyists and readers that reveal much about the social and aesthetic contexts of manuscript production. Each chapter illuminates a different aspect of Taylor’s thesis: Chapter 1 develops the notion of ‘cultural capital’, illustrating the social potential of lyric creation through a discussion of poetic competitions, both real and fictional. The manuscript compilation of lyrics is seen as a means of expressing relationships and consolidating identity: a notion that is mapped on to the single-author codices of Christine de Pizan and Eustache Deschamps. Chapter 2 discusses Charles d’Orléans’ personal manuscript, BnF fr. 1719, and its developing role as repository of poetic dialogue and exchange. Chapter 3 examines a range of collective manuscripts, including Carpentras MS 375, copied for Marie de Clèves, and tracing the links which these manuscripts reveal between different poetic coteries. In her final chapter, Taylor describes Antoine Vérard’s printed anthology, the Jardin de Plaisance. This is the most innovative and interesting of the studies, exploring the editing process and the importance of the manuscript’s iconography and rubrication in creating a sense of narrative cohesion between its disparate lyrics. Taylor argues that the presentation of this lyric anthology both conferred meaning upon the lyrics and created a sense of ‘elite sociability’ among its readers. The strength of this volume lies in its thoughtful and detailed analysis of both well- and lesser-known anthology manuscripts. It provides an excellent resource for further research into the social and poetic dynamics revealed by late-medieval lyric collections. It would have been useful, however, if the chapters had been more closely integrated to produce a clear overall sense of the shifting relationships among poets, patrons and readers. As it stands, the chapters serve more as individual studies of particular manuscripts and aspects of manuscript compilation than as a coherent thesis, and the conclusion poses more questions than it attempts to answer.