A singular testament to the period of transition that was the Renaissance, the Cent cinq rondeaux d’amour certainly merit the meticulous efforts of Françoise Fery-Hue to reintroduce this largely forgotten text to a learned public. Given its context of chivalric romance in an era that would usher in a new lyricism, its late medieval poetic form of the rondeau that would soon give way to the sonnet, and its moralizing tone under a regime that was increasingly humanistic and hedonistic, this anonymous volume owes its relegation to oblivion to finding itself at odds with the victor of nearly every culture war in the decades following its composition. Indeed, cultural transformations are also at the heart of Fery-Hue’s primary enterprise, which is to examine this exemplary text beneath the lens of the historical passage from the written manuscript to print transmission of literary production.

The threshold edition in Brepols’s newly announced series Du manuscrit à l’imprimé, Fery-Hue’s volume earns its place as standard bearer with the duteous, detailed, and rigorous approach adopted by the editor. Her explanations of literary context, with discussions of form, setting, symbolism, and thematics (including a very useful and succinct definition/history of the rondeau-cinquain verse structure employed by the author) are thorough and thought provoking. In exploring the question of authorship, she critically presents all historical theories of attribution, at the same time adding new layers of intrigue informed by her own analysis of the text. The remainder of the 160 pages of prefatory material exhaustively examines the various editions — both manuscript and print — detailing physical description, ownership history, etc., and focusing perhaps most interestingly on the differences from one edition to the next.

The text itself, composed entirely of 105 fifteen-verse rondeaux exchanged between an otherwise unnamed and minimally described unmarried man (“L’homme”) and an equally starkly defined married woman he aims to seduce (“La dame”), is handsomely laid out with the male protagonist’s poetic plea presented alone on the top-half lefthand (verso) side of the open book and his desired lady’s reply directly parallel to it, across the gutter on the right (recto) side, creating a sense of symmetry between poems. Beneath each rondeau, on the bottom half of the printed page, the reader finds an accounting of all variants between editions. Following the main body of text, the editor continues her critical exposé with various prologues, examples of variants that go beyond minor precisions, and a full re-creation, in smaller format, of the entire first 1527 print edition of the text. Finally, an explanation of versification, an alphabetic table of rhymes, a glossary of archaic terms, a list of pertinent early modern proverbs/idiomatic expressions, an index of first lines, and an ample, thorough bibliography round out the collection of critical tools offered to the reader in this modern edition. The concluding pages of this finely constructed, hardcover volume offer visual support with six photographic reproductions of various editions of the text, manuscript and print.

That the Cent cinq rondeaux d’amour, originally conceived ca. 1512/13, were written for and offered with a didactic aim to the adolescent François d’Angoulême, who only a few years later would be crowned Francis I of France, a revered patron of letters and legendary philanderer, also makes this text of great interest. This is especially true considering the dialogues written by the king’s sister and royal consort Marguerite de Navarre, as well as the moral lessons of her own writings. Do the Cent cinq rondeaux d’amour represent a precursor to Reformation thought? Did their form and content doom them to fall quickly from favor in the court? To what extent do they influence the epistolary genre of subsequent centuries? Offering no direct answers to these queries, Françoise Fery-Hue has provided a complete, scientific edition with all necessary textual aides to explore the above and all other theses pertaining to this important pre-Pléiade early print text that she so diligently brought back to light.