The prose redaction of Chrétien’s Conte du Graal alongside its two prequels and three of its Continuations in the 1530 edition, produced in black letter, by the publishing syndicate of Jean Longis, Jean Saint-Denis, and Galliot du Pré has long been an object of fascination. Extant in eighteen copies held in libraries across Europe and the US, it represents the first postmedieval material manifestation (either in prose or verse) of Chrétien’s text and its pre/sequels, as well as the last published version to appear before the late eighteenth century. To date, the main reference edition of the prose Perceval had been that offered by Alfons Hilka as an appendix to his 1932 edition of the Conte du Graal, but this contained only Chrétien’s text and its execution is far from living up to the standards we would expect of critical editions today.

Maria Colombo Timelli, the editor of the present volume, has made an eminent career out of the study of the 1530 Perceval both with respect to the object and the text it contains. She presents to us here a much needed full critical edition of the first three branches of the First Continuation which, she promises, will be followed by a volume dedicated to the same text’s fourth and fifth branches, as well as ones for the Second Continuation, the Manessier Continuation, and finally the Élucidation and the Conte du Graal together (19). What the book fails to mention is whether the other prequel present in the 1530 edition, the Bliocadran, will be included as part of this project (one would assume in the last volume), and why the constituent parts should be published out of order with respect to their compilation in the 1530 edition. There may be a pragmatic reason for this editorial decision, but it is not one that the preliminary matter allows the reader to understand.

Otherwise, the introduction contains all the usual and expected tools including detailed plot summaries, a methodical overview of the extant artifacts and their associated editorial history, a discussion of the practice of prosification in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and a description of the principles of edition employed in the text. All these preliminary materials are delivered clearly and concisely with a welcome lack of fuss. The edited text that then follows is mercifully uncluttered and eminently readable—though this is not to say that extra detail is not provided. Corrections are acknowledged briefly in footnotes while indicators of foliation, paragraph separation, and use of large capitals and headers are all to be seen on the page in the peritextual matter. Meanwhile, more detailed information is sensibly placed at the back of the book. Indeed, some of the most valuable nuggets are to be found here in the end matter, including notes on the text, a glossary, and an index of names. These navigational and critical tools make this edition particularly usable, and importantly serve to engage readers unfamiliar with the many curiosities of sixteenth-century French phraseology and vocabulary. Indeed, such curiosities abound in the sometimes oddly haphazard modernization attempted by the prosifier, a fact also noted and illuminated vividly by Jane H.M. Taylor (Rewriting Arthurian Romance in Renaissance France [2014], chapter 5). It is pleasing, therefore, to see Timelli draw clear, but not distracting, attention to them.

This is a book that, when combined with the related volumes advertised to follow, promises an important opportunity for an entirely new audience to engage with the early modern reception of both Chrétien’s work and that of his epigones. Even where digitized microfilms of the extant artifacts have been made available (such as by the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica platform), the combination of poor quality reproduction and the volume’s black letter typeface makes for a hard read—even for scholars well acquainted with early modern French and the re-presentation of medieval texts in early printed books. Timelli’s achievement here is not only in her delivery of a readable text, but also in her provision of the necessary tools with which to decode it.