Les Eschéz d’Amours

The first volume of a much-needed complete edition of Les Eschéz d’Amours, this constitutes a marriage of deep, careful scholarship and cutting edge digital technologies. A traditional paper edition, its existence is predicated upon both intensive in situ analysis and the use of a custom-made, portable multispectral imaging lab. The text of the most complete witness, Dresden, Sächsische Landesbibliothek Oc 66, also known as MS D, once thought irreparably damaged by the 1945 bombing of the library, has been recovered through the painstaking work of the human and digital eye.

The first 16,000 of a total 30,000 lines of poetry are prefaced by a thorough and enlightening set of essays. Gregory Heyworth’s scholarly prose has a lucidity that belies the complexity of its subject matter, drawing the reader easily into the mosaic history of the text, its influences, and its two extant manuscripts. A number of conundrums surround Les Eschéz and its manuscripts, including its date, author, genre, and even title. Daniel O’Sullivan’s codicological and Heyworth’s historical analyses offer a highly plausible date for MS D as c. 1480, while completion of the text is suggested as 1377—again a very likely date. The Eschéz author as cleric is suggested, but not one who had taken orders, given the secular, humanist proclivities of the text. Heyworth conjectures the author could likely be found in “the faculty of liberal arts at a Parisian university” (33). The suggestion that the poet may have been a physician is called into question, for while there is frequent use of medical language and clinical metaphor, Heyworth notes that the Eschéz author borrows wholesale, with no expansion on the subject matter. This does, however, leave the question of the author’s particular fondness for medical analogy. The suggestion that Evrart de Conty, the text’s famous commentator, was responsible for the poem is also rejected: auto-exegesis, it is convincingly argued, would have been self-defeating, since the commentary often challenges the allegories and furthermore trespasses on the text’s insistence on its own inherent “mystery.”

The discussion of the poem’s title is fascinating since, as is noted, neither of the extant manuscripts contains one. The poem has been known as Les Eschéz amoureux, Raison et sensualité (thanks to a translation by Lydgate), and Les Eschéz d’Amours. The first is problematic, since the use of chess as an allegory for love is not the overarching purpose of the poem. Lydgate’s title is deemed better suited since it relates to the real meat of the subject matter: a turning away from the sensual towards reason. The third title had been rejected by several scholars, but Heyworth argues masterfully for an alternative understanding of it as not “The Chess of Love,” but “The Checkmate of Love,” pointing out that in the second half of the poem Love is vanquished by reason. He further conjectures that the poem circulated in two different forms, with the alternate titles indicating reception: first as Les Eschéz amoureux, which contained only the first, more sensual part of the poem, and later as Les Eschéz d’Amours, the extended version in which Pallas persuades the Acteur to renounce his cupidinous path.

The chapter on literary context will prove very helpful for scholars and students alike, providing a full account of the intersection of Les Eschéz with late medieval literary genres and demonstrating how this text traversed boundaries. It partakes of a web of authority that includes Ovid and his medieval moralizers, the speculum regis tradition, the Roman de la Rose, Augustine, Boethius, Jacopus de Cessolis’s chess satire, and Giles of Rome, to name but a few. This chapter is tacit argument for the text to be placed on the curricula of courses on Middle French literature, as indeed is O’Sullivan’s elegant summary of the plot.

O’Sullivan provides a clear overview of the editorial policy, and this...