Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France: From Manuscript to Printed Book by Jane H. M. Taylor (review)

The history of the book has a long tradition of segregate approaches to its subjects. Fault lines have become deeper in the last generation as the academic discipline has grown, as disciplines do, by expansion and cell division. The period of c. 1450 to c. 1550 qualifies as a distinct section in any approach because those are the years that saw printing developing from experiment to a technology with immeasurable impact on society. In almost all the studies regarding book production during those hundred years we can see, in a worrying development, the ever sharper divisions between those trained in manuscript studies and those primarily working with printed books, between those approaching books (whether manuscript or print) out of interest in textual transmission, and those who focus on their production, whether in a scriptorium or a printing house. These divisions are criss-crossed by national traditions in scholarship, for example the inclination to theoretical abstraction in the francophone world as opposed to Anglo-Saxon pragmatism.

Jane Taylor’s book aims to bridge more than one of these divisions. She is an English scholar, much influenced by recent French literature on readership; her main subject is printed books whereas her methodology is firmly rooted in the traditions of manuscript studies. She applies this to a wide range of Arthurian texts printed in France until the mid-sixteenth century and sporadically thereafter, her focus ‘the work and techniques employed by publishers and their workshops to renew Arthurian romance for a new readership’. Arthurian romance is a relatively small area in the total of vernacular book-production, but one in which she shows confident expertise. The constant theme of her book is the interaction between publishers and readers, printers showing, as she memorably puts it (p. 118) ‘commercial judgement of a particularly acute kind: not just the ability to predict taste—a matter of commercial judgement—but the intention of forming taste . . . guiding the reception of exemplary texts for a new and socially diverse reading public’. She demonstrates this in a sequence of textual comparisons between successive editions of particular texts, ranging from the Lancelot compilation published in 1488 in partnership by Jean du Pré and Jean le Bourgeois (ISTC il0003300), reprinted three times by Antoine Vérard in 1494 (ISTC il00033600), c. 1499 and in 1506, and a much abbreviated version published in 1591, which begins to have the appearance of a chapbook, or more specifically, a precursor to a publication in the bibliothèque bleue (which, as she observes, never included Arthurian texts). Vérard’s first edition was conceived with royal and aristocratic patrons in mind, and also shows a marked development in presentation of the text. Woodcuts serve to show the structure of the text, but this is further supported by division into chapters with rubric titles, which can then be listed in tables of contents. Such structural devices which facilitated the absorption of contents, became permanent features; eventually, in 1591, the abbreviated Lancelot even boasts an alphabetical index.

Although for none of these editions printer’s copy is known to survive, and it is usually impossible to pinpoint manuscript sources used by the printers, it is nevertheless obvious that the texts were constantly adapted to the tastes of their times. Spelling and vocabulary have modern forms compared with available manuscript versions, but the editing appears to have gone far beyond this. Tales were retold, inconsistencies corrected, endings changed. Episodes borrowed from other sources might be inserted, as, for example, in the compendium of Grail texts published by Galliot du Pré, Michel le Noir and Jean Petit in 1516. Subtleties and allusions employed by Chrétien de Troyes in the twelfth century, or anonymous authors in the thirteenth, might become more explicit; there is less ironical distance. In due course the racy speed with which the popular prose versions of...