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Reviewed by:
  • Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature
  • Daron Burrows
Culinary Comedy in Medieval French Literature. By Sarah Gordon. (Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, 37). West Lafayette, IN, Purdue University Press, 2006. ix + 220 pp. Pb $43.95.

This study takes as its focus the treatment of food, including the pursuit, preparation and consumption thereof, in a range of courtly and comic narratives. While much of the primary material covered is well known (Chrétien's romances, canonical fabliaux, Roman de Renart), some less familiar texts are also included (e.g. Hunbaut and Vengeance Raguidel, albeit using Hippeau's edition rather than Roussineau's successor). Each of the four main chapters explores the varying roles that food plays in the narrative structure of the genres covered, frequently as a device for articulating commentary on characters and, in some cases, the society that they represent. Through this approach, the analysis offers a number of valid and convincing —if not necessarily, for the most part, surprising or contentious —observations, and thereby certainly provides a persuasive demonstration of the importance of food in all its forms to the texts' construction. The book is not, however, without a few problems. In a study of this length, especially when significant space is given over to general introductions of texts, plot summaries and extensive quotations, it is inevitable that an attempt to cover a large number of different texts will tend to result in a series of rather cursory analyses which hint at, but leave largely unexplored, potentially fascinating issues relating both to the individual texts and to the central theme itself, with the socio-anthropological dimension particularly seeming to merit further investigation. The work is also not beyond reproach in terms of scholarly presentation. The range of secondary material covered is sparse, and references to it are often imprecise and allusive (e.g. p. 190 n. 4). The treatment of primary material is often more opaque: for most of the comic narratives mentioned, for example, it is not stated which edition is being used. There are also a number of miscellaneous infelicities (e.g. 'whom' for nominative, pp. 104, 111; apparent migration of comment on Le Bouchier d'Abeville to paragraph on La Plantez, p. 112). Finally, while pinning Old French down to a single modern English translation can be a thankless task, a number of the renderings proposed are more than suspect (e.g. Cil chevalier l'acuillent a gaber | Et de fort vin sovent a abrever: 'This knight met them, joking around and often drinking much strong wine', p. 36). Nevertheless, beyond [End Page 333] these less palatable features there are certainly some tasty morsels on which to ruminate.

Daron Burrows
University of Manchester
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