Chartier in Europe (review)

Chartier in Europe is an important and welcome addition to the ongoing reassessment of the fifteenth-century French poet and diplomat Alain Chartier, particularly on the issue of assessing his broader legacy as an author and the impact of his oeuvre on the late medieval and early modern literary cultures not just of France, but throughout Western Europe. Chartier was revered as "the father of French eloquence" and a powerful political spokesman during the sixteenth century, and routinely ranked with Dante as the greatest of European vernacular writers; his works were collected in some two hundred fifteenth-century manuscripts and twenty-five early printed editions. But Chartier's reputation subsequently declined to the point that he has now become known primarily for having provided the inspiration (and title) for Keats's poem "La Belle Dame sans Merci." The volume's eleven essays, written by a blend of established and younger scholars from the fields of English, French, History, and Scottish and Hispanic studies, address the full range of Chartier's work, his courtly as well as political writings, both poetry and prose. The editors organize the material into three thematic categories: "Authorising Chartier," "Transmitting Chartier," and "Translating Chartier." These headings occasionally seem a bit fuzzy or even arbitrary, and grouping together the four essays on La Belle Dame sans mercy and then the three on the Quadrilogue invectif might have made just as much sense. But the overall high quality of the essays, combined with their consistent success in exploring wider theoretical issues rather than simply restricting their focus to Chartier's writings, would doubtless lead most of us to read the entire volume no matter what the ordering principle.

The first four essays, "Authorising Chartier," assess Chartier's own construction of an authorial voice. Douglas Kelly's "Boethius as Model for Rewriting Sources in Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Esperance" opens the series and serves itself as something of a model for the entire collection in its dual interest, paying close attention to the particulars of Chartier's work but also to the wider implications of its cultural contexts and intertexts. Kelly develops a valuable distinction between a model, which provides commonplace features that a later writer uses as a pattern or framework, and a source, which supplies the content that fills out that model. In this case, Chartier has taken his structural model from Boethius, but he radically modifies the content and message by incorporating Biblical and patristic sources into the argument, finally recasting Boethius's relatively abstract personal and philosophical consolation into a nationalist and religious consolation. Florence Bouchet's essay also analyzes Chartier's adaptation of Biblical sources, showing how he invokes Biblical authority to establish his own political authority as a prophet and preacher within the "polyphonic" framework of Le Quadrilogue invectif. These two essays on his French prose are then balanced by a pair on his French verse, with Dana Symons and Barbara K. Altman exploring Chartier's creative appropriations of proverbial and allegorical discourses, respectively, in La Belle Dame sans mercy and the Livre de Quatre Dames.

The next three authors focus on "Transmitting Chartier," investigating the material context of the transmission and reception of his work in diverse manuscript traditions. Emma Cayley compares the two ostensibly distinct patterns of transmission for the "official" and political Latin texts and the "unofficial" and poetic French texts, finding a high degree of overlap and interweaving that links rather than separates the two domains. Joan E. McRae's "Cyclification and the Circulation of the Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy" takes as its starting point the odd fact that the several poems in this series are frequently, in fact usually, gathered out of their intended narrative sequence in the manuscripts, despite the abundance of internal clues that would easily have enabled a correct ordering. McRae demonstrates that many of these manuscripts were constructed from precirculated individual poems published as booklets that were later collected and bound together in cumulative or composite volumes. As with most...