Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric ed. by Earl Jeffrey Richards (review)

h8arthuriana of the "Chaucer Tradition" [1982]), Julia Boffey ('The Reputation and Circulation ofChaucer's Lyrics in the Fifteenth Century' [1993]), A. C. Spearing ('Father Chaucer' [1985]), Louise O. Fradenburg ('The Scottish Chaucer' [1981]), Tim William Machan ('Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve, Lydgatc, and Henryson' [1992]), John Bowers ('The Tale ofBeryn and The Siege ofThebes: Alternative Ideas of The Canterbury Tales' [1985]), and C. David Benson ('Critic and Poet: What Lydgate and Henryson Did to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde' [1992]). Space, unfortunately, precludes my commenting on each of the articles included here, but in collecting them together, the volume does succeed in creating a conversation about the ways that Chaucer did—and did not—influence his fifteenth-century emulators. Seth Lerer brings the fifteenth century and the casting of Chaucer as its literary paterfamilias (the focus of the majority of the contributions cited in the preceding paragraph) to a close in 'At Chaucer's Tomb: Laureation and Paternity in Caxton's Criticism' (1993). By the time of Caxton's introductory commentary to the Eneydos (1490), Chaucer's authority, Lerer concludes, has been transformed: 'To be a writer after Chaucer is no longer to be a rewriter ofthe poet. It may be to invoke him and his status in a pantheon of English and antique auctores, as Hawcs does; it may be, too, to seek his imagined approval, as Skelton does. But it is not, primarily, to mime his forms' (270). Pinti has assembled a useful set ofcommentâties on the fifteenth-century's reception of and engagement with Chaucer. It is unfortunate that the volume is afflicted by mundane but annoying sorts ofproblems suggestive ofeditorial neglect: inconsistent replacement ofdouble hyphens by em dashes and straight quotation marks by 'curly' ones; the introduction of typographic errors not present in the originals; and the failure to correct errors contained in the originals (e.g., the inconsistent dating of Caxton's second edition of the Canterbury Tales by Lerer as 1483 and 1484). In addition to more rigorous proofing, editors offuture volumes might also consider providing updated bibliography in the form of'Suggestions for Further Reading' (as Partridge does at the end of his essay). Finally, given the audience for which this series is intended, a paperback edition at a substantially lower price (e.g., R. A. Shoaf's Chaucer's Troilus & Criseyde... Essays in Criticism volume, produced for Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies), would seem a reasonable desideratum. DANIEL W. MOSSER Virginia Polytechnic Institute earljeffrey richards, ed., Christine de Pizan andMedievalFrench Lyric. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998. Pp. 224. isbn: 0-8130-168-5. $55. This collection ofessays, edited by Earl Jeffrey Richards, explores Christine de Pizan's unique contribution to French lyric, with particular attention given to the ways in which Christine challenged literary conventions. The volume brings together nine essays that were first presented at the Southeast Medieval Association in New Orleans (1993) and the Twenty-ninth Annual Congress of Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo (1994). Most of the contributors are well published in Christine scholarship and their essays expand on their previous writings. REVIEWS149 In an introduction to the volume, Richards draws a sharp distinction between earlier nineteenth-century scholarship that tended to focus on the autobiographical nature of Christine's writings and the present volume in which the contributors propose 'more productive' questions, such as 'How original is Christine? What did she know about other medieval French and Italian (or even Provençal) poets?...' (67 ). While the present collection certainly breaks with nineteenth-century approaches, it unquestionably rides piggy-back on the rich resources of twentieth-century scholarship. The contributors' dependence on these writings is amply documented in the individual bibliographies of each essay. The introduction, however, would have certainly benefited from a greater engagement with Christine scholarship ofthe past twenty years to situate better the fine essays that follow. Unfortunately, Richards restricts his comments to a scathing critique of Roberta Krueger's study ofChristine in Women Readers andthe Ideology ofGender in OldFrench Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), an argument that he will develop more extensively in his co-authored essay with Judith Laird. In spite ofthe shortcomings ofthe Introduction, the nine essays are engaging...