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DESCHAMPS, EUSTACHE. L’art de dictier. Éd. Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine. ClermontFerrand : Paleo, 2010. ISBN 978-2-84909-556-0. Pp. 70. 45 a. Students and teachers of medieval French poetry will be delighted that a short, useable edition by Jean-François Kosta-Théfaine of Eustache Deschamps’s L’art de dictier is now available. This volume is one in quite a series of texts and translations by this prolific young scholar, and presents a new edition of this important French treatise. Why is this edition so important? Eustache Deschamps, prolific fourteenth-century courtier poet (c. 1340–1404), who left us almost 1,500 poems, also penned this first ars poetica in French 200 years before Sidney’s Defense of Poesy in English. Deschamps was an active member of the courts of the dukes of Orléans and Kings Charles V and VI, and chronicled the doings and personages of his day in his Livre de memoire (not extant) as well as many of his forme fixe lyrics. A disciple of Guillaume de Machaut, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, a friend of Oton de Grandson, and respected elder friend of Christine de Pizan, Deschamps and his work disappeared from the reading public not long after his death, and only began to be of interest to scholars in the nineteenth century not for his poetry, which his editor Gaston Raynaud deemed second-rate, but for the richness of his vocabulary (attested by various Old French dictionaries which point to Deschamps’s poems for first attributions) and the sardonic and unflinching eye the poet cast on his times (noted by historians from Huizinga to Tuchman). When my own edition and translation of L’art de dictier appeared in 1994, it was the first translation into any modern language. That edition is now out of print. Until today, there has been no French edition since the Société des anciens textes français’s in Volume 7 of the 11volume complete works of Eustache Deschamps (1891). Kosta-Théfaine’s workmanly edition quite correctly is based on MS BNF Fonds français 840, the only complete collection of Deschamps’s works, and offers variants from MS BNF Nouvelle acquisition française 6221 while omitting MS Arsenal 3292, a copy of MS 840. The editor also gently notes lacunae and suggests a small number of emendations. There is a glossary, though readers unskilled in medieval French may wish it had been longer. There is an idiosyncratic list of studies on the Art de dictier itself and a bafflingly short list of general studies of the poet. The introduction to the volume is similarly tiny, providing a brief introduction to the poet and the poetic forms addressed in the treatise. Perhaps KostaTh éfaine’s forthcoming French translation of the Art de dictier (Paleo) will provide a more substantial analysis of the work or situate it in the tradition of the artes poeticae. Still, for the instructor who can take the text and supplement it with secondary materials, or the scholar seeking a first encounter with this singular work, KostaTh éfaine has provided a valuable new resource. Stevens Institute of Technology (NJ) Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi EDWARDS, NATALIE, and CHRISTOPHER HOGARTH, eds. This ‘Self’ Which Is Not One: Women’s Life Writing in French. Newcastle: Cambridge, 2010. ISBN 978-1-44382079 -0. Pp. 167. £34.99. Cette collection de neuf essais examine les récits autobiographiques de deux générations d’auteures de langue française, de Marguerite Duras à Nina Bouraoui et atteste, par le biais d’une critique postcoloniale et féministe, d’un intérêt renouvelé 946 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 pour l’écriture autobiographique. Cet excellent travail collectif est principalement consacré aux stratégies narratives pour exprimer le moi. À travers les diverses voix de ces écrivaines ressort un moi fragmenté, multiple, s’opposant à l’écriture autobiographique masculine du passé qui privilégiait un ‘je’ stable et complet. Dans son essai sur l’œuvre autobiographique de Marie Cardinal, Leila Sebbar et Hélène Cixous, Amy Hubbell analyse la position de chaque écrivaine comme individu “divisé et double” (36) toujours partagé dans son ‘moi’ et ses écrits entre...

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