‘Moult a sans et vallour’: Studies in Medieval French Literature in Honor of William W. Kibler ed. by Monica L. Wright, Norris J. Lacy, and Rupert T. Pickens (review)

This eclectic collection of twenty-eight essays in French and English by established academics reflects William W. Kibler’s wide-ranging scholarship in the field of Old French literature. The volume is organized alphabetically rather than thematically or generically, but contains some interesting contributions to Arthurian, Marie de France, and chanson de geste studies. Among the more substantial essays, Philip E. Bennett offers a detailed diachronic study of tombs in epic and romance; William Calin makes various perceptive remarks on French Arthurian romance while focusing on two Scots adaptations; and Norris J. Lacy cites Dutch, German, and French examples in his magisterial, witty demonstration of how early romance narrative is structured like a labyrinth (unicursal), while later romances, having no discernible goal, resemble mazes. Marie de France’s sophisticated narrative technique is analysed by Joan Tasker Grimbert, who concentrates on audience expectations in Laüstic; by Rupert T. Pickens, on ambiguity in Fresne; and by June Hall McCash, who fruitfully compares the anonymous king in Bisclavret with Arthur in Lanval, concluding that the author of Melion, in naming the king Arthur, exhibits a more positive attitude towards the legendary sovereign than Marie. Her Chievrefoil, according to Logan E. Whalen, is an intertext for the ‘Lai de joie’ mentioned in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide. There are eleven essays on the chanson de geste. Gerard J. Brault reassesses the function of the twelve peers and the theme of compagnonnage in the Roland, while Joseph J. Duggan, after comparing the positioning of references to authors and scribes in a number of epic manuscripts, concludes that Turoldus was a scribe. Several scholars focus on the Franco-Italian epic: Leslie Zarker Morgan on Huon d’Auvergne, Jean-Claude Vallecalle on divination in various fourteenth-century Franco-Italian chansons de geste, and Robert Francis Cook on the rhyme sequences in V4. Cook’s attention to textual and metrical detail is replicated by Edward A. Heinemann on laisse structure for comic effect in the Charroi de Nîmes, and by Carleton W. Carroll, who reassesses more positively the fate of Chrétien’s stylistic and metrical virtuosity in manuscript A of Erec et Enide. No Festschrift would be complete without an edition by Tony Hunt, here a late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman prose translation of extracts on geography from Isidore’s Etymologiae. Manuscript studies are represented by Keith Busby on text and image in the Getty Tundale (one of the lesser-known texts treated in this volume), and by Carol J. Chase on the paratexts (tituli and illuminations) in manuscripts of the prose Joseph. Articles are also dedicated to Partonopeu de Blois, La Fille du comte de Ponthieu, La Vie de saint Gilles, the Charlemagne window at Chartres, Hermann de Valenciennes, the Old French Crusade Cycle, Ogier le Danois, translating the Prose Lancelot, and pathos in Chrétien and Marie’s rhetorical descriptions. The volume could have been more rigorously edited: there are several typographical errors, and it is disconcerting to find Cook twice referring to laisses reproduced below (pp. 126–27) but nowhere to be seen. However, the essays are mostly competent, many offering the mature reflections of very eminent scholars and worthy of their honorand.