Alexandre le Bourguignon: étude du roman 'Les Faicts et les Conquestes d'Alexandre le Grand' de Jehan Wauquelin (review)

Contributing to the long-overdue resurgence of scholarly interest in literary works produced at the court of Valois Burgundy in the mid-fifteenth century, this study focuses on Jehan Wauquelin's prose version of the story of Alexander the Great. Sandrine Hériché-Pradeau's book not only provides an invaluable complement to her excellent critical edition of this text (Droz, 2000), but further advances our knowledge of the writerly practices adopted by this scribe/translator/compiler whose works featured heroes such as Alexander and Girart de Roussillon, who were purportedly the ancestors of the Burgundian dukes and whose deeds foreshadowed their descendants' political, dynastic, and territorial ambitions. Part I offers a meticulous analysis of the different ways in which Wauquelin adapted his various sources for the Alexander story — some in prose and others in alexandrine verse form — so as to create a homogeneous narrative in terms of its use of direct discourse for dialogues, psychological explanation of character motivation, and amount of detail employed in the description of battles. Part II examines the different influences on Wauquelin's actual writing style of contemporary genres such as the chronicle, the epic, the epistolary tradition, and the nouvelle, and shows the thematic progression in the author's treatment of a hero who is transformed from being a simple conqueror of territories to gaining the status of a wise and exemplary ruler. It also argues that the role played by the supernatural in this text gradually changes from that of providing mere exoticism to revealing Alexander as a symbolic figure whose conversion to monotheism teaches important lessons about the limitations of the human pursuit of conquest if uninformed by religious faith. Part III gives a detailed account of the images in two de luxe manuscripts of Wauquelin's work, both of which were commissioned by Philip the Good, the first in 1447 and the second around ten years later: Paris, BnF, MS fr. 9342, with its 80 illuminations, and Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, Collection Dutuit, MS 456, with 204. On the evidence of the close correspondence between text and image in the first of these manuscripts, which was produced around the same time as two other highly prestigious works for which Wauquelin was also responsible (the translation of the Chroniques de Hainaut, as preserved in Brussels, KBR, MS 9242, and the mise en prose of Girart de Roussillon, as found in Vienna, ÖNB, MS 2549), Hériché-Pradeau confirms the likely role played by the compiler himself in the conception of these images, which bring out the political dimension of the text; by comparison, the more generic cycle of illustrations in MS 456 (produced after Wauquelin's death) reveals a more cursory and superficial knowledge of the work. Whilst this third section of the book serves as a useful introduction to the study of these images, forty-three of which are reproduced here, the interested reader should nonetheless refer to the much more extensive discussion that Chrystèle Blondeau provides in Un conquérant pour quatre ducs: Alexandre le Grand à la cour de Bourgogne (Paris: CTHS/Institut national d'histoire de l'art, 2009).