The Old French Lays of Ignaure, Oiselet and Amours (review)

This is the third work of collaboration between Glyn Burgess and Leslie Brook, who have already brought out two important editions of Old French lays. The work of editing, translating, and annotating a series of Old French lays and of providing comprehensive introductions to them is highly demanding: this collection of three lays represents an achievement that would be extremely difficult for a single scholar. Researching the sources and analogues for the story of the coeur mangé ('eaten heart') in Ignaure, for instance, is in itself a considerable undertaking, and this book includes two additional lays, Oiselet and Amours.

The authors continue the format of the series of Old French lays of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that they have been editing, translating, and annotating since 1999. The three lays here are very loosely connected, having little in common. Ignaure, for instance, is narrative, but Oiselet and Amours are anecdotal. They share no literary purpose: Oiselet is didactic and Ignaure is parodic; Amours aspires to portray a courtly love but does not progress beyond a declaration of love. Oiselet and Ignaure do not reflect courtly values even to the extent that Amours does: Oiselet espouses an everyday pragmatism in the bird's proverbs, and Ignaure is far removed from a courtly ethos in its story of the protagonist's libertinism and the savage revenge wrought upon him by the twelve lords he has cuckolded.

None of these three lays can be considered to be a 'Breton' lay in origin, and Burgess and Brook refrain from using the term in this collection. Nevertheless, the genre began with attribution of the original lays to the Bretons and for some 50 years or so the Old French lays dealt primarily with Breton material. Only Oiselet here has any suggestion of magic or the Celtic Otherworld: the garden withers when the bird leaves it. The location of the lays is not discernibly Breton: the location of Oiselet is not specified, while Amours takes place in two adjoining countries that are not named. Ignaure is set around the castle of Riol, which Rita Lejeune has suggested could be Rieux (near Redon in Brittany); even if she is right the mention of location is purely perfunctory.

Without the collaboration of these two scholars these lays might well have been treated in separate monographs. What is gained by linking these disparate lays, one might ask? The answer that seems to emerge is that they illustrate the range in tone and content of the later Old French lays. 'As time passed', the authors state in their Introduction, 'the term "lai" was certainly used by writers and scribes in an increasingly loose fashion to designate a wide range of short narrative poems ... which had at least some connection with the world of the court and with the themes of love and chivalry' (p. 2). But even that description is too inclusive, for there are a number of Old French lays that are not narrative at all but merely anecdotal.

Burgess and Brook have devised a nearly identical structure for their discussion of these disparate lays, thereby imposing a basic unity upon their disparate material. That is why their book is such a successful collaboration. Each lay has its own Introduction in which the authors discuss, most importantly, the manuscripts and editions they have used, the author and date of the lay, the sources and analogues of each poem, the chief themes and characters, and the genre to which each poem most seems to belong. In these discussions of genre, here and in their two previous collections, the authors might well have left behind an unprofitable aspect of twentieth-century scholarship: an obsession with the issue of genre that failed to produce a clear definition of it. That was not an aspect that preoccupied the Old French lay-writers themselves. Burgess and Brook describe the lays as...