Building upon Georges Doutrepont’s seminal 1939 study, Les Mises en prose des épopées et des romans chevaleresques: Du XIVe au XVIe siecle, these twenty-two well-documented articles continue the analysis of multiple late medieval and early modern prose works. Stemming from research supported by the MIUR (Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca), this volume is a companion piece to the recent Nouveau Répertoire de mises en prose (2014).
The first five articles consider aspects of David Aubert’s role in the production and transmission of multiple works for the Burgundian court. Known as a scribe of the late fifteenth century, Aubert, it is thought, served also as author and translator of such works as Croniques et conquestes de Charlemaine and Renaut de Montauban. Scholars have long analyzed Aubert’s precise role in the production of these works, arguing for or against his additions to original manuscripts. Given the prolific nature of his work, it is possible his name was appropriated as a label for all copyists’ work produced in his workshop. Anne Schoysman provides a succinct overview of recent scholarship, which has focused particularly on technical aspects of the texts’ presentation. The inclusion of dedications, rubrics, and other aspects of the paratext have led to a new concept of the livre while also further establishing Aubert as escripvain according to the Middle French definition: simultaneously scribe, secretary, and author. Bernard Guidot’s examination of Aubert’s use of digression and didactic analyses in the chansons de geste and Valerie Guyen-Croquez’s study of Aubert’s appropriation of Doon de Mayence in his rewriting of Croniques are of particular note. The latter article best articulates a principal motif found throughout the collection: new iterations of established stories and texts were conceived to please the contemporary audience by highlighting elements sympathetic to its distinctive vocabulary, aesthetics, and political circumstances. Guyen-Croquez emphasizes, for example, that the less violent protagonists in Aubert’s Croniques reflect a more orderly political state of the fifteenth century than that of the thirteenth century in which the original epics were composed.
The eleven essays comprising the second section consider the ways in which manuscripts were maintained and transformed as the printed form became established. The myriad range of topics in this section reveals as much about the nascent printing culture and its commercial practices as they do about specific texts. Stephanie Rambaud’s thorough overview of the role of the printer-bookseller offers a fascinating glimpse of the trade’s development by tracing the range of activities found among the eleven booksellers on Paris’s Rue Neuve-Notre-Dame. Her emphasis on the family Trepperel serves as a good introduction to Sergio Cappello’s study of the editions by Jean II Trepperel. Cappello argues convincingly that several novels attributed to the first Jean Trepperel were indeed printed by Jean II and concludes that along with Galliot Du Pré and Philippe Le Noir, Jean II was among the most prolific Parisian editors of the 1520s. Caroline Cazenave’s study of the first printed editions of Huon de Bordeaux examines the complexities printers faced in printed illustration. She notes, for instance, that although black-and-white engraved blocks could not represent the colors described in the text, condensed symbolisation brought clarity to the rich narrative.
The third section focuses on short narratives such as Vie des Pères and Grantz Geanz, well recognized throughout the Middle Ages but not researched by Doutrepont. The final essay, Stefania Vignali’s study of the Ordene de Chevalerie, an early thirteenth-century anonymous text, underscores the mutability of some of these works. One of the first works in non-Latin—specifically Franco-Picard—to closely describe the ceremony of a knight’s dubbing, Vignali clearly traces how the five-hundred-line Ordene was cited and rewritten in multiple verse and prose works.
The essays—twenty in French, two in Italian—are well edited, with most including copious notes and graphics. The indexes of titles, names, and manuscripts are welcome additions as most readers will be consulting Raconter en prose for information on a specific text; the variety of length and scope among the essays as well as the three sections’ discrete topics make it less readable as a whole. Nonetheless, taken together, the essays convey the dynamic aesthetic of early Renaissance transmission and rewriting of medieval poetry and narratives.
