Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel, and: Le 'Bestiaire d'Amour' et la 'Response du Bestiaire' (review)

These two editions represent excellent additions to a series that provides ample scope for textual variants, linguistic study, glossaries, and detailed literary analysis to accompany its reliable texts and readable translations. Jakemés's late thirteenth-century romance on the eaten heart theme, which has survived in two manuscripts, has been edited twice before. However, although Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas has chosen the same base manuscript as in the 1936 edition by John E. Matzke and Maurice Delbouille (Paris: Sociéte des anciens textes français), and has edited it conservatively, medievalists will welcome this easily accessible version of the text with its copious notes. The Châtelain de Coucy is the earliest-known third-person biography of a poet and provides fictional contexts for the composition of the cited lyrics. Gaullier-Bougassas places the work in the tradition of thirteenth-century romances with lyric insertions and of troubadour vidas and razos, while also looking forward to the fourteenth-century narrative dit on the subject of love. She shows how Jakemés adapts his predecessor's poetry to new amorous situations, even composing some lyrics himself. Although the adulterous relationship cannot survive in the real world and ends gruesomely, it is not condemned by the romancer, for whom the châtelain is a convenient alter ego, impressing his lady more with his poetry than his prowess. Of particular interest in this new edition are the scholarly notes on the inserted lyrics, which cover their transmission in other manuscript collections and refer the reader to Alain Lerond's edition of the Châtelain de Coucy's collected poems.

In re-editing Richard de Fournival's Bestiaire Gabriel Bianciotto has taken into account the five manuscript copies discovered since Cesare Segre's 1957 edition (Milan: Ricciardi), but more importantly he argues that the two rhymed versions of the Bestiaire d'Amour and the long version of the bestiary attributed to Pierre de Beauvais cannot be used to establish Richard's original text. This is because recent research has demonstrated that the long version (now dated 1240–60) was probably not by Pierre (who was active between 1200 and 1220 and was primarily a translator, not a compiler) and that its anonymous author actually drew on Richard's text when expanding Pierre's short version. The 151 pages of introduction offer a detailed account of Richard as bibliophile and author, showing how he took information about the different animals from a wide range of sources beyond the bestiary tradition, choosing only those characteristics susceptible of an erotic interpretation. He thus renewed the tradition by creating a text in the manner of the Physiologus, but exploiting its analogical structure to different ends. The Response accompanies Richard's Bestiaire in four manuscripts, and Bianciotto has chosen manuscript A as his base for both texts. Having reviewed the research on authorship, intention, and function of the Response, the editor disagrees with Jeanette Beer, who argues that the author was a real woman whose aim was to attack Richard's blatant misogyny. Bianciotto prefers to see the work as participating in a literary game, creating a jeu parti with the Bestiaire. Whatever the circumstances of its production, readers unfamiliar with the work will be fascinated to see that the Response offers some early pro-feminist arguments a century or more before Christine de Pizan championed women. Most strikingly, the Response's female speaker includes an account, found in the Talmudic tradition, of Adam's 'original' sin, the killing of his first wife. Although his bibliography is rather quirkily ordered chronologically rather than alphabetically, Bianciotto...