L'échelle Des Styles: Le Haut Et Le Bas Dans La Poésie Française À La Fin Du Moyen Âge by Ludmilla Evdokimova (review)

This wide-ranging book investigates rhetorical style and register in medieval poetry. It opens by reprising the debate surrounding the challenge of distinguishing rhetorical style posited by critics like Auerbach, Hatzfeld, and Panofsky. By turning our attention to these authors, to Zumthor's Essai de poétique médiévale that enjoins readers to consider "registre" rather than "style," "type" rather than "topos," and to Poirion's understanding of "style" as multivalent, Evdokimova traces the contours of a rhetorical history that helps anchor newer critical approaches to understanding style and associated markers of authorial identity. Evdokimova then proceeds to her objective: to analyze the hierarchization of stylistic registers in the works of Guillaume de Machaut, George Chastelain, and Jean Molinet, while also parsing the terminology associated with stylistic and literary debates surrounding each author. Evdokimova's approach is fundamentally comparative: Machaut is read against classical and early medieval grammatical treatises, and against his successor Eustache Deschamps. Chastelain's works are situated against a backdrop largely conditioned by Italian humanistic treatises, the artes praedicandi, and works by Boccaccio and Petrarch. This section ends with a comparative analysis of versification strategies and the literary, political, and rhetorical polemics informing Chastelain's satirical Le prince and Jean Meschinot's response by the same name. The third section aligns Molinet with a culture steeped in Boccaccio, Petrarch, Augustine, and others, to underscore Molinet's simultaneous engagement with literary and religious intertexts. While Evdokimova's overview of elements necessarily at the fore of evaluations of the "gamme des styles issue d'influences théoriques variées" (174) is somewhat cursory, she intersperses her recapitulation with discussions of primary sources demonstrative of a profound literary acumen. Her study of intertextual borrowings and literary heritage is especially perceptive. She engages deftly with numerous texts, many of which are lesser known, rendering the associations she acknowledges all the more innovative. Yet questions of influence and originality are often handled in an excessively economical, slightly repetitive fashion that would be more compelling with examples and sustained analyses. For instance, after introducing how Chastelain read "plusieurs œuvres de Pétrarque et de Boccace" (61), Evdokimova concludes simply that reading their works "a laissé des traces dans plusieurs œuvres de Chastelain" (64). Pithy intertextual engagements of this nature, illuminating though they may be, muddle larger discussions of how medieval poets negotiate Latin and vulgar styles. A specific achievement of Evdokimova's work is the textual support she offers with footnotes, "Annexes," and her vast bibliography. While longer notes go to the crux of quandaries that have occupied scholars for centuries, they also trace arguments in miniature suggesting areas wherein future research is necessary and new critical attention might prove insightful. These judicious yet dense ancillary comments alone make Evdokimova's book a valuable resource. However, one wonders why they are not fully incorporated, as the clarity they provide would also render the analysis more cohesive. Keenly attuned to intertextual resonances, though slightly inconclusive, L'échelle des styles is an ambitious and largely successful effort to bring new insights to a longstanding literary debate.