Philippe de Commynes: Memory, Betrayal, Text is a beautiful demonstration of how literary analysis can shed new light on nonfictional texts. The book focuses on the Mémoires that the exiled fifteenth-century nobleman Philippe de Commynes wrote near the end of his life and that recount his service to Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and subsequently to the French King Louis XI, Charles’s political enemy. Given Commynes’s status as a uniquely placed actor during a crucial period in the formation of the French state, the Mémoires have long been prized as an invaluable source of historical information on areas such as early diplomatic practice.

Kleiman approaches the text from a different angle, however, stating that she is less interested in finding out, for example, exactly what happened between Commynes and Charles the Bold than in tracing Commynes’s efforts to describe his life and decisions. Working with the text, rather than reading through it, she accords as much significance to what Commynes leaves out as to what he includes and how he includes it, thereby uncovering several themes that thread themselves throughout the Mémoires and stitch the work’s contents to its written presentation. One of these themes is betrayal. Commynes writes the Mémoires during his exile from the French court following Louis XI’s deathbed revocation of the property that he had bestowed upon Commynes as recognition for his service. The Mémoires do not directly depict this royal retraction, or even Commynes’s own abrupt shift in allegiance from Charles the Bold to the French king earlier in his career. Yet, as Kleiman persuasively argues, the shadow of these betrayals haunts Commynes’s own efforts to depict his loyalty to the Crown with the instruments of language and memory, instruments whose own unreliability is repeatedly borne out by the events he describes.

Kleiman’s attention to issues of textuality, memory, and betrayal serves to highlight the fascinating issue of Commynes’s vexed subjectivity. As she astutely points out, Commynes’s entry into the service of Louis XI transformed him from feudal favorite to royal subject, and the king’s retraction of his gift of land and title further complicated his identity. What does it mean to write from such a position? Given the monarch’s tendency to view any assertion of an independent will as treasonous, how can Commynes clear a space for himself as an author while presenting himself as unfailingly loyal? Kleiman treats these questions with great sensitivity, noting how Commynes uses the stories of others, such as Charles’s daughter Mary and the double-dealing Saint-Pol, as foils for his own, which may be impossible to convey directly. She pays close attention to the author’s self-presentation, noting his frequent recourse to images of human touch as well as his alternations between the passive and active voice. These detailed and convincing readings are enhanced by Kleiman’s mastery of the historical and critical contexts surrounding Commynes’s work, which allows the reader to appreciate the extent to which the Mémoires alter or elide the events they describe.

Kleiman also makes an effort to connect the issues raised by the Mémoires to various theoretical frameworks. Her references to Foucault, Freud, Hayden White, and scholarship on trauma, while initially a bit jarring, are rarely forced, and speak to her passionate and accurate conviction that this fifteenth-century text has much to contribute to current discussions of power and subjectivity. Yet her assertion that the Mémoires inaugurate modernity, along with her frequent and relatively unexamined use of the word individual, serve to undermine the nuanced touch she deploys elsewhere in the work and account, perhaps, for the surprising and near-total neglect of the complex ways in which religion framed subjectivity and political authority in this period.

These minor reservations take nothing away from Kleiman’s tremendous accomplishment in establishing the Mémoires as an essential work whose timeless complexity conveys the deep conflicts besetting agency and authorship in fifteenth-century France. Extremely readable, thoroughly researched, and always engaging, Philippe de Commynes: Memory, Betrayal, Text will no doubt succeed in bringing the Mémoires to the wider audience they deserve.