This far-reaching work persuasively describes a medieval poetics of ambiguity: it demonstrates how, in a wide-ranging selection of medieval texts, meaning is indistinct and indeterminate. Falling between generic and stylistic distinctions, whether of chronicle, hagiography/historiography, theater, roman, or lyric, these texts blur significance, multiplying possible readings. This volume proposes to explore not what may be ambiguous for modern-day readers, but rather instances of “authentic ambiguity” (12) intended by the author and received as such by readers. As such, it insists upon the plurality of this poetics. Rather than a study of such mixed genres as the fantastic, comic, or fabliaux, it examines works that 1) are intentionally at the border of distinct genres, 2) mix styles in order to destabilize the reader, and 3) introduce a play of obscured meaning. The work treats a wide-ranging number of primary texts, most of which are drawn from Northern France in the High and late Middle Ages, from the Guillaume d’Orange cycle to François Villon (although Guillaume IX’s Occitan “Vers de dreit nien” opens the volume).

The critical terms of the study are three: ambiguity; the in-between (l’entre-deux); and blurring, both in terms of genre (brouillage intergénérique) and of meaning (brouiller le sens). These terms give the volume its structure. Divided into four parts—“Laughter and the epic: between [static] ambivalence and [dynamic] ambiguity”; “Religious parodies or writing of the in-between”; “Intergeneric blurring and ambiguity of meaning”; “Blurring meaning, or making meaning”—this work is progressive in nature. That is, if it begins at an elemental position in which ambiguity is differentiated from ambivalence, it concludes with the assertion that a poetics of ambiguity not only blurs meaning, but indeed creates meaning (deriving from Meschonnic’s forme sens). In this, such a poetics is new and experimental, and yet not necessarily in opposition to tradition (18, 464). The goal of a poetics of ambiguity is the destabilization of the reading public, a goal which is also, strikingly, Boutet’s own for this work (459).

One of this work’s primary assets is its reminder that play is not only a characteristic of the postmodern. Boutet defines this medieval play as being not (simply) ludic but also technical, akin to the play that may be experienced in such machinery as cogs (11). Here, it is the play between genres and styles, between multiple possible meanings and interpretations that creates gaps in readers’ expectations. This machinery terminology is not chosen by chance; such machinery represents the kind of unbending and stiff culture, social institutions, and general rigidity in which such a poetics is situated, and which is enacted in Boutet’s oft-repeated term scélrose (as both noun and adjective, meaning sclerotic, fossilized, hardened) (46, 58, 70, 71, 307, etc.). Indeed, Boutet’s concluding sentence suggests a broader horizon, as he asserts that a medieval poetics of ambiguity—and thus of originality—may save (all?) literature from such sclerosis (464).

Despite its title, which suggests an analogy between ambiguity and l’entre-deux, this study carefully distinguishes them: l’entre-deux derives from the writing of the text itself, whereas ambiguity is a “phenomenon of reception” (459–60). This distinction is important, and the analysis here oscillates between production and reception: it provides close textual readings and evaluates reception; this latter is based most often on the readings of modern critics. At times, the ambiguity that Boutet analyzes is in fact located in this modern critical reception. Such is the case for his discussion of the Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, identified here as the earliest exemplar of a poetics of the entre-deux [95]: Boutet persuasively argues that modern critics (e.g., Favati, 1965; Owen, 1967) want to see a single interpretation that the text itself denies. His readings of primary texts are also at times conditioned by, or in response to, modern scholarship. Such is the case of his reading of Guillaume de Lorris’s Rose, which places itself in opposition to interpretations of its presentation of fine amor as spiritual (Ribard, 1973) or mystical (Kamenetz, 1986). Boutet argues that the equivocal nature of love here is located in the garden of Déduit, with its polysemous fountain (and ambiguous figure) of Narcissus (following Hult, 1981). A greater attention to recent works of scholarship on medieval literature in English—Chamberlin’s Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity (2001); my Medieval Poetics of Contraries (2006); Armstrong and Kay’s Knowing Poetry (2011) come to mind—would have been useful. In the end, Boutet’s assertion of a medieval poetics of ambiguity is as illuminating as it is newsworthy.