The Man Who Believed He Was King of France: A True Medieval Tale by Tommaso Di Carpegna Falconieri (review)

REVIEWS 284 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The examination of typeface in dictionaries is a memorable highlight. It is unfortunate that the typographical theme of this chapter resurfaces rarely in the remainder of the book—this is the only strand of Echard’s study that tends not to be woven in throughout an otherwise cohesive book. Chapter 2 traces the practices of illustration in two romances—Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton—and demonstrates to great effect the impact of particular woodcuts on the survival of medieval texts. Chapter 3 examines the marks of authenticity in practices of copying and later facsimile creation, in the context of British aristocrats’ medieval genealogical claims. The fourth chapter turns to adaptations of Chaucer for children, and in particular the paratextual apparatus supplied within these volumes for both mothers and children. In Chapter 5 Echard presents the ways in which the English claimed Froissart’s Chroniques as an English text. For each text Echard provides a concise reception history and situates her specifically visual focus within that history. The resulting historical breadth of Echard’s study is of great value. Even as the much-studied revival of medieval texts in the nineteenth century features prominently in this book and particularly in the later chapters, it does not dominate . In place of a conclusion, Echard offers a coda on digitizations of medieval manuscripts. Here she explores the extent to which today’s digital representations (or the “avatars” of the manuscripts) conform to our expectations of print and manuscript—that is to say, of the materiality of texts. She suggests, “we are still very much functioning within the traditional world of the book, even as the manuscript goes digital” (207). The emphasis on, indeed the need for, particular sorts of materiality persists within digitization projects, despite the absence of (what we understand as) the material text. Echard’s coda thus records a struggle with the immaterial materiality of the digital. She notes, for example, that “the digital is, of course, not material;” even as she quickly admits, “or rather, it must be materialized through the new media of the screen and keyboard” (212). Indeed, this coda demonstrates that there might be very little “of course” in the world of the digitized text. Throughout Printing the Middle Ages, Echard challenges us to notice precisely those features which we take as a matter of course, and to ask what these features tell us about our own relationship to the medieval . Without rejecting digital texts, Echard cautions us against facile equations of the digital and the material for the purpose of increasing access to medieval texts. She remains sensitive to the need and desire to touch, see, and otherwise experience the materiality of the texts—a desire that she records in the preceding chapters. She invites us to reflect on the “tension between access and absence ” that characterizes digitization projects (214). As we embrace digital reproductions, Echard reminds us of the need for a critical awareness of what these reproductions enable and what they preclude. HELEN MCMANUS, Political Science, UCLA Tommaso Di Carpegna Falconieri, The Man Who Believed He Was King of France: A True Medieval Tale, trans. William McCuaig (Chicago and London : University of Chicago Press 2008) 224 pp. REVIEWS 285 In 1345 a hermit living near Cressay, named Friar Giordano, was summoned to the home of an aging noblewoman, Marie. On her deathbed, she confessed to him a startling sin: many years previous, she had given birth to a son at the same time as Queen Clémence of France, and was made wet-nurse to the royal child. When Marie’s own son died, she (aware that the child was the strongest link she had to her lover and secret husband) claimed it was the prince who had died, and took the real prince home in lieu of her deceased child, raising him until age seven, when his Sienese father took custody. The kingship, meanwhile , had been inherited by the regent because of the young prince’s death. Marie was confessing, in other words, that there was a true king of France, rightfully entitled to the throne. All this against the backdrop of the Black Plague...