Charles d’Orléans’ English Aesthetic: The Form, Poetics, and Style of “Fortunes Stabilnes.” ed. by R. D. Perry and Mary-Jo Arn (review)

This insightful and timely book directs new critical attention squarely toward an understudied but fascinating body of fifteenth-century English verse: the English-language poetry that Charles d’Orléans, poet, prince, and prisoner, left behind him when his twenty-five-year captivity in England came to an end in 1440. Charles’s French-language body of work, which he took back to France with him on his release, and which he added to over subsequent years, has long been the subject of detailed critical inquiry and justified appreciation: its formal, linguistic, philosophical, and social complexity is well known, as is the iconic “personal manuscript,” begun in England and continued throughout Charles’s life, in which it is preserved. It is fair to say that the English-language poetic sequence, surviving now in one manuscript copy (London, British Library, MS Harley 682) and fragments of another (the “Oxbridge” manuscript, consisting of leaves found in two different books), and partially (though not fully) based upon parts of Charles’s French-language corpus, has been far less systematically approached and understood. This collection of essays forms an important and necessary step toward remedying that lacuna: focusing entirely upon the English poetic sequence (dubbed Fortunes Stabilnes by Arn in her 1994 edition), its contributors draw on an extremely welcome range of methodologies and disciplinary approaches to push our understanding of Charles’s English poetics, and their at times problematic critical reception, into new and productive areas.

The impulse, shared by many of the contributors, to situate Charles’s English-language work within and in conversation with fifteenth-century English poetic production and dissemination, whether that be geographically, linguistically, formally, or bibliographically, is particularly welcome. It is very clear how the specific, and fairly unusual, circumstances of Fortunes Stabilnes’s composition have allowed it to be thought of as an “outlier” or something of an oddity within an English poetic tradition. Indeed, the work is maybe best known for some of its highly unusual linguistic coinages and forms. This book conclusively and excitingly demonstrates the extent to which that critical position limits our understanding and appreciation of the cultural work undertaken by this text. Taking full advantage of recent shifts in approaches to the Franco-English political, literary, and linguistic connections and entanglements, it opens up a raft of new questions about the complex poetic artistry of Fortunes Stabilnes, its responsiveness to earlier forms of poetry in English and in French, and its place within an early fifeenth-century English literary context and tradition. (Indeed, one thread that runs through the book, evoked by many contributors—and to which there are, from the evidence presented here, complex and contradictory answers—is the extent to which Charles might be considered a “Chaucerian” poet, and just what Fortunes Stabilnes’s deliberately constructed aesthetic and thematic debts to Chaucer, in particular, might be.)

The volume’s editors divide the contributions loosely into two groups: those that marshal and analyze linguistic, metrical, and formal evidence from the poem (or a sample corpus from it) to provide “systematic accounts of practices” (R. D. Perry, “Introduction,” 20–21; chapters by Eric Weiskott, Ad Putter, Richard Ingham, and Jeremy Smith), and those that engage with style, compositional practice, transmission, and content more widely, in order to open up new approaches to the text (chapters by John Burrow, Elizaveta Strakhov, Jenni Nuttall, B. S. W. Barootes, Andrea Denny-Brown, Simon Horobin, and Philip Knox). This results in a very varied set of approaches that allow for multiple routes into analyzing Fortunes Stabilnes to be addressed and explored, and to be set in conversation with one another. The accounts and analyses of Charles’s technical poetic, grammatical, and linguistic practices in particular will provide readers in different disciplines with...