Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad by Jane Gilbert et al. (review)

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad is the final output of the AHRC project Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France (http://www.medievalfrancophone.ac.uk). However, this book differs from the other major publication that resulted from the project—the collection of essays in Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France: Studies in the Moving Word, edited by Nicola Morato and Dirk Schoenaers (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). There, nineteen essays investigate specific aspects of medieval French across Europe. In this book the authors could have simply devoted a chapter to each of the six textual traditions that provided the basis of investigation for Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France. Instead, they take the more interesting approach of examining the networks of medieval French by drawing on the evidence offered by texts, textual traditions, and manuscripts at different times and in different places. One of this book's strengths is its integrated examination of French from Acre to Artois, Lombardy to London. Rather than studying the French of England, the French of Outremer, or the French of France separately, the authors instead find commonalities and communities in the treatment and use of French in diverse places.

In the introduction, the authors lay out the multiple discourses in which they intervene: they approach medieval French literature freed from "the frameworks of national literatures associated with modern nation states" and instead offer a different perspective that shows how the history of medieval French literature arises from a network of texts and manuscripts from across Europe (3). They dispense with a focus on seemingly "canonical" authors to draw out the importance of later redactors, scribes, and readers in the formation of French textual traditions. Geographically, the authors focus primarily on England, the Low Countries, the Italian peninsula, and the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Textually, the book deals primarily with Alexander romances, Guiron le Courtois, the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César, the Lancelot-Grail cycle, Tristan romances, and the Roman de Troie, although they touch on other texts as well. Tracing the changes and adaptations to these textual traditions through time and space, the authors reveal "new sociohistoric and cultural contexts" that change our understandings of the forms and values of French (24).

Chapter 1 examines how French served local rather than universal purposes. The authors argue that Geoffrey Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, a verse history of England written ca. 1136–37, seems suited for a particularly Insular, English-speaking audience. In employing French—mixed with some English—to write a history of England, Gaimar plays on the status of French as both a supralocal and extremely localized language. The second half of the chapter turns to the prose version of the Roman de Troie in Grenoble, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 861. In this manuscript, made in Padua in 1298, the language, prosification, and decorative features work together to locate the creation and reading of the text in late thirteenth-century northern Italy. Importantly, the authors argue that rather than reproducing "debased forms of imported 'French' literary culture" (57), both the Estoire and the Roman de Troie show how French can reveal the purposeful dissemination of texts within specific regions.

In the second chapter, the authors turn to the widespread movement of French, in contrast to the localization of the previous chapter. The authors demonstrate how movement among northern Italy, the Low Countries, Britain, France, and the eastern Mediterranean shaped the transmission and textual tradition of the Tristan and Guiron cycles. Rather than understanding the development of these traditions as tied to one particular place, one language tradition, or one authorial original, the authors instead propose a "compilation model" that accounts for the collective building of a textual tradition (83). Prose romances, likened to Pierre Nora's lieux de mémoire, mediate a Christian past, present, and future.

While the first two chapters examine textual traditions, chapter 3 focuses on the texts in one particular early fourteenth-century manuscript: British Library, Royal MS 20...