Shaping Courtliness in Medieval France: Essays in Honor of Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner ed. by Daniel E. O’Sullivan and Laurie Shepard (review)

Shaping Courtliness is a highly personal volume, littered with dedications to Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner and praise of her work (it even contains a poem composed in her honour (‘Envoi’, p. 285)). This does not, however, detract from the fact that the eighteen essays within contain a substantial quantity of rigorous and exciting work, with considerable appeal for readers who may have no personal connection with their dedicatee. Bruckner’s preoccupations with twelfth-century French romance and lais, and with the afterlife of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances, are reflected by the volume’s content, which includes pieces on Thomas’s Anglo-Norman Tristan, Marie de France’s Guigemar, the Burgundian prose adaptation of Cligès, and the process of literary evolution from Chrétien to Christine de Pizan. Meanwhile, her interest in human–animal relations is echoed by contributions examining the Conte du Papegau and Richard de Fournival’s Bestiaire d’amours. Very impressively, the volume avoids being either restricted to Bruckner’s immediate subfields, or becoming a motley collection of essays with no unifying theme. Peter Haidu’s vitriolic opening piece sets up the guiding interest, though not the general tone or explicit politics, of the rest of the collection: ‘Psychic denial of reality is perfectly understandable, given the murderously totalizing greed that accompanies the contemporary collapse of late-capitalist civilization in its proto-fascist aftermath. […] Authentic critique relocates the text in its social co-text, over and against which the concrete text defines itself’ (pp. 43–44). From among Haidu’s furious prose (which is, unfortunately, often wilfully opaque) emerges the question of relocating the ideological, literary construct of the court within its political, social, legal, and economic context. What results is a collective New Historicist account of medieval courts, guided by the relationship between the historical circumstances of the court and Old and Middle French literary productions. This intermingling of historical and literary studies occurs within individual articles such as Michel-André Bossy’s piece on the British Library’s MS Royal 16 F II (which contains 164 poems by Charles d’Orléans) in the context of the Wars of the Roses. Equally stimulating, however, is the fruitful juxtaposition of mutually complementary articles by specialists from different fields. An excellent example of this comes in Part III (‘Shaping Women’s Voices in Medieval France’), which takes essays by two of Bruckner’s ex-doctoral students, William Schenck and Daniel O’Sullivan, and the troubadour expert Elizabeth Poe. Of these three, Schenck’s is the standout piece, analysing Ermengarde d’Anjou’s oscillation between court and convent using hagiography, charters, and clerical letters to paint a vivid, nuanced picture of the cultural factors determining the choices and limitations facing Ermengarde as an aristocratic woman of the twelfth century. This incredibly rich account itself follows the (also excellent) essays by Poe and O’Sullivan, which, respectively, continue Bruckner’s work on the female troubadours (here Na Lombarda) and explore the nature of Marian devotion in Old Occitan song. The sophisticated, pluridisciplinary examination of courtly womanhood that is the outcome of such a combination is a highlight of this superbly eclectic but also very coherent collection.