Devis de la langue française (1559), suivi du Second Devis et principal propos de la langue française (1560) par Alberte Jacquetin-Gaudet (review)

Over the last dozen or so years, the editions that have appeared in the Champion (now Classiques Garnier) series ‘Traités sur la langue française’ have provided the raw material for a new history of metalinguistic comment and grammatical practice in sixteenth-century France, typically challenging, or at least supplementing, the master narrative contained within Ferdinand Brunot’s monumental (and still influential) Histoire de la langue française. This recent edition by Alberte Jacquetin-Gaudet is a worthy addition to this praiseworthy endeavour, introducing to a wider readership the metalinguistic work of an individual written off by Brunot as an ‘amateur’ and an ‘homme tout à fait inférieur, d’esprit changeant, d’intelligence médiocre, de style diffus’ (p. 12). Jacquetin-Gaudet’s Introduction acknowledges the lawyer Abel Matthieu’s marginal status as a non-specialist writing for a limited audience of nonspecialists in ‘un contexte historique peu favorable’ (p. 60); it also, however, brings out the documentary value of his two Devis de la langue française, which exemplify the enthusiasm for the ‘defence’ of the vernacular present in courtly and professional circles on the eve of the Wars of Religion, and which represent an attempt to make the workings of the French language comprehensible to readers unversed in grammatical or literary theory. Matthieu shares with his contemporaries both the strident demand that the French language be kept free from (unnecessary) foreign borrowing and the recourse to foreign models — in this case Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua — that underpins French writers’ promotion of their vernacular, along with a marked tendency to conflate metalinguistic and moralistic comment. What distinguishes Matthieu from other writers, however, is the rigour with which he pursues his dream of a ‘pure’ form of French untainted by foreign borrowing, which, in the second Devis, extends to the creation of a home-grown set of grammatical terminology, largely metaphorical in nature, to replace the Hellenizing vocabulary of his ‘scholastic’ contemporaries. Jacquetin-Gaudet’s decision to transcribe Matthieu’s texts with the very minimum of editorial intervention has the merit of preserving the author’s — or his printer’s — occasionally idiosyncratic typographical style but does not always facilitate legibility, in particular where the distinction between <e> and <é> is concerned (e.g. ‘deboutt[é]s’, p. 153; ‘allegu[é]s’, p. 218); there are, in addition, some instances where Jacquetin does not respect her own principles of transcription (e.g. the distinction between and <j> on p. 155 and p. 214, between <u> and <v> on p. 156, and between <ou> and <où> on p. 151). A glossary of terms that may be unfamiliar to a modern reader (e.g. ost, p. 97; privaulté, p. 171) is also a surprising omission in an edition of this kind. Such minor quibbles aside, however, Jacquetin-Gaudet’s edition has the merit of bringing to a wider readership a work of both documentary value and undeniable originality.