Eustache Deschamps, ca 1340–1404: anthologie thématique ed. by James Laidlaw et Christine Scollen-Jimack (review)

Eustache Deschamps remains—despite a series of excellent recent studies—one of the great unloved of late medieval French poets: Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Othon de Grandson, Christine de Pizan, once also neglected, are now much analysed; Eustache's collected works, in the huge BnF, MS fr. 840, as well as in the eleven-volume edition published for the Société des anciens textes français between 1878 and 1903, have, it seems, been thought too voluminous for comfort, too prosaic, too various — and in any case inaccessible. (MS fr. 840 and the eleven volumes of the Œuvres complètes are now available on Gallica — but consulting them, or locating a particular lyric, remains cumbersome.) This volume should go far to give us a revised, and much more attractive, Deschamps. The editors operate a strict selection policy: of some 1400 lyric poems, they have selected just 250 and classed them according to subject; so topics such as 'Moraliste et philosophe', 'Le Chevalier et la guerre', 'Le Voyageur chauvin', 'Le Maître de maison', allow us to see a thoughtful and coherent Deschamps rather than the trite and facile rhymester whom we may have imagined. The poems have been re-edited against fr. 840; the editors note, scrupulously, the points at which the copyists have emended or corrected the texts, and ensure, by an elaborate (and very useful) set of cross references, that each poem can easily be located in fr. 840 and the nineteenth-century edition. More important, and particularly for the research student (and indeed the scholar): the poems are accompanied by a rich and invaluable critical apparatus. First, a brief biography, followed by a 'Chronologie' listing over some eighteen pages every archival reference to the poet and setting his life in the 'public' context in which he appears as civil and court servant. Next, a description of the manuscripts, principally, of course, fr. 840, but also including some mention of manuscripts in which small selections, even single poems, appear. This is followed by a brief exposition of the ways in which ballade, rondeau, chanson royale, and virelai are conceived by Deschamps himself in his Art de dictier. The collection proper is provided with notes as to references, proper names, circumstances of composition (if known), then with an excellent glossary and a comprehensive bibliography — and finally with a full battery of indexes: topographical, nominal, subject, allegorical figures, first lines, refrains. This is far more than a nice anthology, although it is indeed just that: it is a valuable research tool that will serve not only to bring Deschamps's poetry to a far larger audience, but also to illuminate poetic practice in the later Middle Ages. And it might also serve as something of a model for similar anthologies drawn from the torrential lyric outputs of late medieval lyric, by a Machaut, for instance, or a Froissart, or even, so appropriately here, for a Christine.