Amplification as Gloss in Two Twelfth-Century Texts: Robert de Boron's 'Joseph d'Arimathie' and Renaut de Beaujeu's 'Li Biaus Descouneüs' (review)

This poorly written, repetitive and disorganized book is not without interest, but should arguably have been reduced to a handful of medium-length articles and strictly edited. Its author has been ill-served by her advisors and her publisher. The book's main merit is that it acknowledges the scholarship of Douglas Kelly, although in my view it also attributes inordinate importance to William Ryding's old book on Structure in Medieval Narrative(1971), long surpassed as state-of-the-art and surely deserving not much more than a footnote these days. Oddly, Rittey nowhere justifies the choice of Robert's Josephand Renaut's romance of the Fair Unknown as the objects of her study. They are, to be sure, crucial, even foundational, texts for the study of twelfth-century narrative, and even if Chrétien de Troyes has been amply studied by Kelly and others, the reader needs to be told why Robert and Renaut—and not others—deserve their privileged status. Specialists of Old French might dispute some of Rittey's readings, but there is nothing essentially wrong-headed or misguided about her views. Indeed, the notion, derived from Kelly, in particular, that choice and treatment of source material, authorial interventions, genre, character portrayal, descriptioand repetition (the subjects of six of Rittey's seven chapters) serve an author's antancïon(the subject of the first chapter), articulating structure and transmitting meaning is fundamentally sound, some would say indisputable. The problem with Rittey's undertaking is that it is yet another case of 'have model, will travel', where the primary aim appears to be to illustrate the validity of a particular theory. Where the book does make a contribution, but again following in Kelly's wake, is to restore the author to the kind of prominence of which he (mainly) has been long deprived by generations of scholars intent on making medieval literature resemble its modern counterpart. The book reads like the thesis I suspect it was, but this is no excuse for the endless (and nevertheless incomplete) reviews of earlier scholarship, where paragraph after paragraph begins with phrases such as 'Kelly says that . . .', 'In Ryding's view . . .', 'O'Gorman notes that . . .', and so on. There are some notable omissions from the scholarship, particularly Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's 1980 study of Arthurian verse romance (English translation, 1998), and studies on the Biaus Desconeüsby Fierz-Monnier, Méla, Meneghetti and Pioletti (there is nothing in Italian in the bibliography, which is almost deutschfreias well); Micha's work on Robert is likewise missing, raising the question of why there is no discussion of the place of the Josephwithin the trilogy. Many texts are quoted without references being given (including Chrétien's romances) and many quotations appear to be second-hand from earlier scholarship, including those of occurrences of the word 'antancïon' from Tobler-Lommatzsch. All in all, this book is something of a disappointment, although those working on Robert de Boron and Renaut de Beaujeu (whom scholars cannot yet bring themselves to call 'Bâgé') will probably want to look at it.