Por s’onor croistre’: mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Pierre Kunstmann ed. by Yvan G. Lepage, Christian Milat (review)

LEPAGE, YVAN G., et CHRISTIAN MILAT, éd. ‘Por s’onor croistre’: mélanges de langue et de littérature médiévales offerts à Pierre Kunstmann. Ottawa: David, 2008. ISBN 978-289597 -100-9. Pp. 526. $36.00. Over his long career, Pierre Kunstmann, now professor emeritus at the University of Ottawa, has produced research breathtaking in scope, spanning literature (Old French, Greek, Sanskrit), linguistics (grammar, syntax), lexicography, and computer science. This collection in his honor skillfully captures the wide-ranging studies of this eminent scholar. Divided into three parts, the collection comprises essays devoted to literary studies, language and lexicography, and ‘varia,’ illustrating the breadth and influence of Kunstmann’s work. It opens with a sensitive biography (Lepage). The literary studies begin with the Miracles de Nostre Dame (MND), a primary area of Kunstmann’s research: the dream vision MND of Jean Miélot (Loula Abd-elrazak); the diabolical seduction scenes in the MND par personnages (Elyse Dupras); generic forms of the miracle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Francis Gingras); and the Latin/French tituli and rubrics of Gautier de Coinci’s MND (Kathy M. Krause). We then find studies of chansons de geste: narrative and metric divisions of the Charroi de Nîmes (Edward A. Heinemann); the transformation of twelfth-century topoi in the fifteenth-century (Dorothea Kullmann), and machines and automatons in the chansons de geste (Leslie Zarker Morgan). This first part concludes with essays on the anonymous jeu-parti Amis, ki est li muelz vaillanz and its unusual female perspective (Ineke Hardy); the bilingual school audience of the Aalma French-Latin glossary [BnF lat. 14748] (Brian Merrilees); and Gand MS 2749 in light of the Crusades (Bruno Roy). The essays on language and lexicography commence with the MND: terms of lexicographical interest from Kunstmann’s 1996 Lexique des ‘Miracles de Nostre Dame par personages’ (Hiltrud Gerner); micro-variations in word forms in the Treize Miracles de Nostre-Dame (Yuji Kawaguchi); and regionalisms in the Miracles de Nostre-Dame de Chartres (Gilles Roques). The rest of the essays here are sundry, including linguistic and grammatical studies: support verb constructions in three twelfth-century romances (France Martineau, Cinzia Pignatelli, and Lene Schøsler); early attestation of lexemes in the Règle de Saint Benoît (Takeshi Matsumura); the schwa in the Mystère du siège d’Orléans (Yves Charles Morin); the final ‘s’ and ‘z’ in Chrétien de Troyes [BnF fr. 794] (May Plouzeau). We also find lexicographical and sociolinguistic analyses: maritime vocabulary in the Estoire de la guerre sainte (Catherine Croizy-Naquet); Latin, Old French, and Middle Dutch in charters of the Abbey of Ninove (Catharina Peersman); the Spanish-Latin Vocabulario of Nebrija (René Pellen); and maritime Italianisms in Marco Polo’s Devisement du Monde (Philippe Ménard). The third part, ‘Varia’, is aptly named. Here we find essays on lyric and poetry: rhyme and assonance in twelfth-century narrative (Charles Doutrelepont); a lectio poetica of a Charles d’Orléans codex (Claudio Galderisi); the style—testimonial, didactic—of Commynes (Robert Martin); and musical chansons in late fifteenthcentury court poetry (Paul Merkley). We discover studies of the modern reception of medieval literature, including Marxist readings of Chrétien de Troyes’s Pesme Aventure (Alain Corbellari); the mystical Wolfram von Eschenbach in Wagner’s Tannhäuser (Maxime Prévost); and the genesis of Wagner’s Lohengrin (Danielle Buschinger). We also find essays on medievalists and computers: PBLit, an interface for exploring multiple databases (Madeleine Jeay and Stéfan Sinclair); a morphological /syntactical labeling system for the Chanson de Roland (Fernande Dupuis and Christiane Marchello-Nizia); and the Nouveau Corpus d’Amsterdam’s syntactical Reviews 587 annotation (Achim Stein). Concluding the collection is Christian Vandendorpe’s essay on the translation of Aeschylean verse, which neatly brings the reader back to where Kunstmann himself began. The editors on several occasions missed opportunities to place individual essays in dialogue by means of proximity (the order of the essays, particularly in the third part, appears arbitrary); however, the essays are generally of an excellent quality. This collection attests to Professor Kunstmann’s significant contributions to Old French scholarship, and to his influence on scholars from a host of different...