Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly (review)

198 Reviews Busby, Keith and Norris J . Lacy, eds., Conjunctures: Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, Amsterdam and Atlanta, Rodopi, 1996; cloth; pp. xxi, 596; R.R.P. US$172.00. To readers w h o are unfamiliar with Douglas Kelly's role in medieval French literary criticism, the best introduction I can offer for this festschrift is to cite from the editors' preface: 'From his first book, an important study of Chretien de Troyes's Charrete, to his acclaimed volume on Medieval Imagination and his monumental The Art of Medieval French Romance, and with other books and numerous articles along the way, Douglas KeUy has assembled a body of scholarship characterised by extraordinary erudition, accurate and painstaking research, and an uncompromisingly humanistic spirit'. Instead of presenting the thirty-nine papers alphabetically by author's name, I take the liberty of discussing them in groups of subject matter. This artifice will assist better to reveal the depth and breadth of the contributions. Linda M . Paterson edits a cansoneta by Marcabru, and explores its rhetorical register and intertextual traffic with Rudel, the crusader troubadour. Elizabeth W . Poe successfully demotishes a whole range of negative criticism of Arnaut Vidal's Guillem de la Barra offered by nineteenth- and twentieth-century occitanists. Sylvia Huot reviews motets built on three words of a responsory from the divine office. The literary and musical functions of the tenor do not always harmonise: w e m a y encounter 'an allegorical exegesis of the flower image', allusions to the Messiah's birth, or the liturgy of the Assumption. Erik Kooper's paper on twins in medieval literature is selective, diffuse, and, as the author states, 'makes no claim to being exhaustive'. There is no mention, for instance, of contrasted hatibrothers w h o were originally twins before narrators decided to change their congenital status. Michel Zink probes the two fires of passion that dominate numerous amorous pursuits, in particular those in Thomas's Tristan. Literary subtleties of structure, such as 'inner dialogues', 'monologues' and narrative 'freezes' (my terminology) underpin the poetic endeavours at all points. Several contributors have offered Douglas KeUy enquiries and comments on various aspects of Chretien's works. Tony Hunt has Reviews 199 been contemplating the poet's prologues for a number of years and now presents his latest reflections. As a practising critic and philologist for fifty years, I heartily endorse Peter F. Dembowski's plea for more notice to be taken of variant readings in manuscripts, in this case those of the important epilogue to Erec et Enide. Three centuries passed before Erec inspired a Burgundian writer to derhyme it and introduce innovations and auctorial emphases. According to Norris J . Lacy, this text is 'an extraordinary instructive witness to the evolution of medieval mentalities and literary methods alike'. The inscriptions on tombstones which Lancelot confronts in the Charrete prompt reflections by Sara Sturm-Maddox on passages exemplifying a wondrous deed in other verse or prose Arthurian romances. Lenora D. Wolfgang, 'Chretien's Lancelot: the fragments in manuscript 6138 of the Institut de France', edits these for the first time. They cover 11. 3615-54, 3735-74, 4781-859, 4861-99 of the Forster edition, and offer close readings of the C T group of codices. The notion of carrying a concept d o w n through time and making it a reafity in the terms of one's o w n culture was not the invention of Dr Who, but was practised by Chretien, as Karl D. Uitti reminds us when he researches the subject: 'Chretien de Troyes's Cliges: romance translatio and history'. Another important group of essays concerns works derived from Chretien's poems. Donald Maddox investigates the contextualisation of feudal customs in the prose Lancelot cycle to ascertain if they were integrated into the plot and affected characterisation in the way Chretien's coutumes did in four out of five of his works. Stacey Hahn uncovers the manner in which inherited nature or nurture envelop adventures of the principal characters. Elspeth Kennedy's focus for her essay is the prose Lancelot, in which the historical Arthurian past may 'take the form of allusions outwards from the text'. She...