The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay by Laura Kendrick (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER within the collection that takes the Pauline principle to heart. Would not this qualify him to be a "gentil"? And, finally, one cannot know whether a study such as this one reveals more to us about the medieval or the modern mind. Kendrick admits that we cannot easily determine "how much medieval people may have con­ sciously understood about the therapeutic possibilities of play or fiction" and that "we have a tendency to remake Chaucer in our own images." It is possible that her book does just that. Nevertheless, ChaucerianPlay seems to impart a deeper understanding to the reader ofChaucer's mind and art, and it is a book that medievalists will want to know. MARY FLOWERS BRASWELL University of Alabama at Birmingham LAURA KENDRICK. The Game a/Love: Troubadour Jfvrdplay. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xiv, 238. $32.50. Kendrick posits a tradition of facetious wordplay which reached its apogee in the songs of the early troubadours, particularly in those of the first troubadour whose works survive, William IX, count ofPoitou and duke of Aquitaine. She claims that the tradition was anticipated as early as the seventh century by the parodist Virgil of Toulouse and the authors of the Hispericafamina and that it was revived in the fourteenth century by the members ofthe academy ofvernacular poetry at Toulouse which was called the Consistori de la subregaya companhia del gay saber. She finds support­ ing evidence of the tradition in the marginalia of certain troubadour and liturgical manuscripts, in Latin compositions in praise ofthe virgin, and in the history of performance practices. Her book is exciting because of its bold hypothesis, its historical breadth, and the diversity of evidence she introduces; both learned and provocative, it calls for discussion at length. For this reader, however, it is not persuasive, because too many of her arguments could easily be reversed and in particular because too many of her translations of Occitan and Latin are inaccurate. Therefore, it calls for discussion in detail. I am left with a feeling ofdisappointment that such an interesting attempt at an innovative synthesis cannot withstand scrutiny. 256 REVIEWS In chapter 1, "Contests and Contexts," Kendrick introduces the govern­ ing opposition ofthe book, a contrast between an acentric world view and a centered one. The former she tracesfrom classical authors such as Lucretius, Varro, and Ovid, down to the contemporary perspective (she alludes to Yeats, "The center cannot hold"); the latter she attributes to Saint Au­ gustine, the Inquisition, and the authoritarian mentality in any period. The contrast is clear, but its application is not. The classical tradition has been put in the opposite camp by recent scholars such as Howard Bloch, as Kendrick acknowledges (p. 5); Sarah Spence (Rheton·c of Reason and Desire: Vergi/, Augustine, and the Troubadours [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988]) reverses Kendrick's analysis, considering the rhet­ oric ofVirgil repressive, that ofAugustine nonantagonistic. Kendrick takes feudalism as a centered institution, overlooking the definition ofit as "the least possible government" which has often been bandied about. When she argues that in popular religion the relics of saints were considered not representative but real, or that vernacular charters were not meant to be authoritative, the strain becomespalpable. She assumes atavisticorigins of the acentric world view which have left little or no evidence and explains that the world view was intrinsically unlikely to produce evidence of its existence. Chapter 2, "Reading Troubadour Verse: The Adventure ofthe Signifier," makes the case for facetious reading of the early troubadors, based pri­ marily on a name and on variant readings in the manuscripts. The name is represented in the manuscripts as la troba neblo in Marcabru, interpreted hitherto as la troba n'Eblo, "the composition of Sir Eble," that is, Eble, viscount of Ventadorn, known as "the singer" (cantator), who was also mentioned as a poet by Beman de Ventadorn and Giraut de Bornelh even though none of his works are extant. Kendrick grants that this interpreta­ tion "is probably correct" but argues that "it might also be possible to understand neblo as 'foggy,' 'obscuring,' or 'obfuscating' or 'insubstantial, worthless' " (p. 25). Later in...