The ‘Viandier’ of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts ed. by Terence Scully (review)

HUMANITIES 113 Zeus, who commits the rape, who is unfaithful to his wife, but who is godly - more powerful - and male, goes unpunished.' She affirms, among many other claims, that Hawthorne demonstrates through Dimmesdale's parallel experience to Hester's that man more easily than woman weathers the conflicts between private experience and the mores of society. My thumbnail sketch hardly does justice to Wall's comprehensive analysis of The Scarlet Letter, but it demonstrates the length and breadth of her analytical procedure. Wall's exhaustive and insightful study paradoxically satisfies and whets the feminist scholar's appetite. Referring to Joseph Campbell's classic work, The Hero with aThousand Faces, Wall remarks, 'if the hero has a thousand faces, the heroine has scarcely a dozen.' Her study of the Callisto myth carefully presents the contours and colours ofone heroine's face, but, simultaneously, it is embryonic. Indirectly, Wall pans the entire portrait - obscured, indeed obliterated - and demands a drawing-out of the other eleven faces of the feminine family portrait. However, like Campbell's, Wall's is a landmark study. As Campbell reveals one all-enclosing myth, so, too, does Walt but Campbell describes male and Wall female experience. Her conclusions are indisputably germane to future feminist myth criticism. (CAROLYN D. HLUS) Terence Scully, editor. The 'Viandier' of Taillevent: An Edition of All Extant Manuscripts University of Ottawa Press. 361, biblio, index, glossary. $29.95 Of the various collections of medieval recipes (it is only with great hesitation that one labels them 'cookbooks,' for nearly all presume a sound previous knowledge by the reader of the principles of cookery), one of the most renowned and most useful is the Viandier of Guillaume Tirel (fl 1330-95), better known professionalli as 'Taillevent.' Five different manuscripts attributed to Tirel survived into the twentieth century (one ofthese, dating from the fifteenth century, was destroyed by fire at the Archives de la Manche in June 1944). 'While obviously related,' Scully observes in his introduction, 'none of the copies is directly, clearly and consistently dependent upon any other copy.' And this was the rule for recipe books as, to a large extent it continues to be today: rare indeed are the established cooks, amateur or profeSSional, who receive a recipe from another, slavishly follow it each time they reproduce the dish, and faithfully transmit it to the next user/improver in the endless process of culinary creation. With the invention of printing the Viandier soon became a 'best-seller' among cookery manuals in France (there were fifteen editions in the period 1490-1604). The four manuscripts which 114 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 now survive have all been published with commentary elsewhere, notably by Jerome Pichon and Georges Vicaire in the 1890S. What makes the present edition different? Its layout, first of all: instead of sequential and separate texts, all four are presented (where all four offer a similar recipe) vertically on the same page, line by separate line, each with a different font so that the reader's eye easily collates and instantly spots variants in the procedures and ingredients described. Blots from cooking sauces have obscured passages, and scribal errors are many, but there are also discernible departures ftom one cook's method to another, some of them based on understandable misreadings (poisson froit, meaning fried fish, is easily taken for froid, with results that must have startled the consumer). With this edition, one can frequently see where the divergence took place, and deduce why. Scully offers the original French recipe(s) with a battery of footnotes, followed by his generally useful and often fascinating commentary and its notes (this often makes for a 'busy' page and some confusion in following numbered references). For linguist or historian, the result is as informative as it is delectable. Secondly, the inclusion of an excellent English translation (277-305) based upon the manuscript in the Vatican Library, which makes this edition accessible to a reader unskilled in medieval French. This is followed by an adaptation to modern tastes offour ofthe recipes (315-19): a sort of almond pudding for Lent, chicken stuffed with Brie, a 'fancy rice' to serve with it, and a dish of stewed cress...