Adrian Armstrong's Technique and Technology: Script, Print and Poetics in France 1470-1550 studies ways in which literary self-consciousness changed in the transition from manuscript to print culture, using as case studies three of the poets of the group known as Grands Rhetoriqueurs. Armstrong's title, though not inaccurate, suggests a somewhat broader study: the reader who seeks a comprehensive study of the change from script to print in France in this eighty-year period (or, for that matter, a contribution to the history of technology) is likely to be disappointed. This is not to say that Armstrong's ambitions are narrow. He seeks, rather-- following an insight from Ismail Kadare's The Palace of Dreams--to provide a methodological model for combining a rigorous, philological attention to material texts with the interpretive work of a literary critic. If scrutiny directed toward the practices of textual criticism has led us to question the 'authentic' status of edited texts, it is all the more incumbent upon interpreters, Armstrong implicitly argues, to attend to material aspects of manuscripts and early printed books.Thus, Technique and Technology does a kind of materialist close reading of selected works by Jean Molinet, Jean Lemaire de Belges, and Jean Bouchet, examining differences in meaning, reception, and literary effects produced by the physical variations among manuscripts and printed editions--and between the two, in the case of these three poets. But it also presents its approach as paradigmatic for the study of late medieval literature more generally.
Armstrong's book is a well-written and solid contribution to the neglected field of late medieval French literature. If the Grands Rhetoriqueurs are "generally regarded as minor artists epitomizing inauthentic artifice" (221), they would still be of interest if only because they were located close to the most powerful political figures of France and Burgundy in their time. Their aesthetics of difficulty, which includes extended allegories, complicated poetic forms, and virtuoso wordplay, has tended to be labeled hyperconventional and stereotyped. (It falls, perhaps, into Huizinga's category of "Symbolism in its Decline"--though following another analogy he makes, the Rhetoriqueurs might better be compared with Jan van Eyck, another artist deploying late-medieval iconography with great technical virtuosity and artistic self-consciousness.) The main current of literary progress in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century has generally been identified with humanism and the taste for classical models, a taste that, in French literature, is embodied in the Pleiade. And although for several decades scholars have been hacking away at such notions, the field of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth- century literature (and art) in France remains understudied. It is a difficult field in which to gain a foothold, since, straddling "medieval" and "Renaissance", it requires so many different kinds of knowledge (palaeography, earlier medieval literary conventions and references, Christian allegory, classical literature and early humanism, medieval and Renaissance culture and politics more generally). In the Rhetoriqueurs' literary world, presentation manuscripts co- existed with cheap printed editions (even as printing supplanted manuscripts' role as the primary basis for the transmission of texts), just as enthusiasm for antiquity co- existed with Christian and courtly themes. Armstrong's book demonstrates the richness of his three poets' use of allegory, parody, reflexivity and stylistic play; it is also notable for including, and intepreting in substantial detail, the drawn, painted, and woodcut images contained in their texts.
Armstrong looks at each poet in turn, starting with Molinet (active 1464-1507), who worked mainly in the context of a literary culture based in manuscript, at the court of Burgundy; then turning to Lemaire (active 1498-1515), also a court poet, but one who made greater use of printing technology; and ending with Bouchet (active 1490s-1550s), who was not a court poet and whose work was, as Armstrong puts it, "overwhelmingly" printed. (10) He asks such questions as, how do aspects of the "grammar of legibility" (initials, rubrication, line breaks, etc.), other elements of layout, and liminary materials, shape potential readers and their experience of the text, foregrounding (or not) elements of authorial self- consciousness? How does the state of the text provide physical evidence for its reception? Which texts were printed and why? To whom do they appeal (in terms of both social class and national allegiance)? How are the formal games (in which elite courtly readers of manuscript texts might have delighted) simplified in print, and rendered more accessible to a larger audience? How do illustrations place special emphasis on certain aspects of texts, indeed, how do they provide interpretations for texts?
Armstrong examines examples of each poet's manuscript and printed works (printed only in the case of Bouchet) in turn. He begins with a number of manuscript compilations of Molinet's poems which highlight literary self-consciousness; then turns to an illustrated manuscript volume containing Molinet's Le Naufrage de la Pucelle, a historical allegory of Mary of Burgundy; and finally addresses several manuscripts which emphasize historical and political content more than literariness. Among Molinet's printed works, he studies the compilation known as the Faictz et dictz; a number of editions printed in Valenciennes in whose production Molinet may have had a hand; and several editions of the Temple de Mars, Molinet's most frequently printed work. Among the manuscript works of Lemaire, Armstrong looks at a compilation of his own works and others owned by the author himself; and other manuscripts of his Epitre du Roy, Concorde des deux langages, and Couronne margaritique, the latter two elaborately illustrated and all exhibiting a thematization of poetry and the act of writing. Next he turns to editions of the Temple d'Honneur et de Vertus, a number of pro- Burgundian editions of the period from 1507 to 1509, and editions of the Epitre du Roi, finding that, increasingly, "texts' self-conscious aspects are foregrounded selectively, if at all" (156), in favor largely of political issues. Armstrong then turns to Bouchet's printed works, including the didactic animal allegory Les Regnars traversant; the Labirynth de Fortune; and finally his Les Anciennes et modernes genealogies des roys de France. Armstrong concludes that a lack of interest in "ostentatious artistry" (206) is evident in Bouchet's editions, but that he foregrounds a personal poetic identity in his work in order to exert authorial control over his printed literary output. Thus, the Rhetoriqueurs' work evolves, in these three examples, from technically brilliant versification which appealed to a restricted audience, to a more personal style which reflected authorial identity in ways which could be more easily transmitted through the printed text.
The risk of combining philology with interpretation is to do neither fully, or to slight one or the other half of the equation. Armstrong's descriptions of the various manuscripts and printed books appear thorough and reliable to this reader (one not familiar with the actual physical objects). And Technique and Technology also contains very convincing interpretive work (e.g. readings of poems by Molinet, pp. 28- 31, Lemaire's Couronne margaritique, pp. 112-119), and elsewhere. But Armstrong's emphasis on material aspects of the text sometimes means that not enough attention is given to other elements, or to larger debates over the interpretation of each text. References to a few theorists (Roland Barthes, Susan Stewart, Hans Robert Jauss) are judiciously sprinkled through the book, but could have been better integrated into Armstrong's broader approach--and might, indeed, have provided salutary ways of thinking about textuality, memory, and reception throughout. As we venture deep into the details of each example, we lose sight of larger thematic issues, which leads to a sense of disconnection. This, too, is a risk of the approach.
Some of Armstrong's visual interpretations seem strained, even reductive, at times, as in the reading of an eagle as alluding to the dove of the holy spirit, or that of the image of the Temple of Venus in the Concorde des deux langages. Contrary to Armstrong's claim about the latter, the image has no true vanishing point (which explains why the mid-section of the image appears "to be not horizontal but vertical", 106), a trivial but nonetheless careless error. Armstrong makes much of the fact that it is the temples of Venus and Minerva that are illustrated rather than other issues relating to national linguistic identity; he sees in these illustrations an emphasis on the text's eroticism. While this is obviously an important counterpoint to previous critical debates on the poem, it might actually be the case that the erotic elements are its most conventional aspect--the necessary background against which other arguments can be made. We might rather see in the illustrations an emphasis on what could be easily depicted, or what viewers--including viewers who could not read the text but might have it explained to them--might be expected to understand. The comparison of Venus and Minerva can be read as an instance of visual pedagogy much like images of the Dream of Hercules studied by Joseph Koerner in The Moment of Self- Portraiture in German Renaissance Art; these images depict a similarly schematized choice at the crossroads of vice and virtue, a structure of binary opposition popular in didactic moralizing imagery in the sixteenth century. In this sense, the images of the Temples of Venus and Minerva might exist as a separate 'text' running parallel to the larger text, rather than strictly commenting on Lemaire's political allegory. The imperative to refer material elements back to the reading of the (verbal) text risks neglecting the fact that images have their own independent history--that they might sometimes be irreducible to issues immediately relevant to the text.
The book could have profited from more ambitious editing in order to strengthen its claims and to make it accessible to the audience Armstrong hopes for--"not solely to specialists in rhetoriqueur poetry, but also to bibliographers and codicologists; to scholars with interests in the phenomenon of literary self-consciousness; and to all those concerned with the literary implications of the materiality of texts" (preface). The decision not to translate middle French texts (or even to resolve sometimes ambiguous abbreviations or to explicate acrostics and other linguistic games) makes it difficult for any non-specialist fully to follow the argument, undercutting the desire to appeal to this larger audience. (This may be due to cost constraints, but it seems an unwise limitation on readership.) Likewise, certain literary references could be more clearly flagged for the reader unfamiliar with, say, the indebtedness of the Concordance des deux langues to the Roman de la Rose or with Martia [sic], the famous Roman painter celebrated by Pliny and Boccaccio. Along similar lines, references to Machaut ("engin peu fertile," p. 94, a play on Machaut's "engin si soutil", familiar from Jacqueline Cerquiglini's book of that title) and Horace ("Combien vaut mieulx tel tumbe que de cuiure/ Dautant que plume volle ou metal ne peut suiure" ["How much more such a tomb is worth than one of copper, as the pen flies where metal cannot follow"], p. 139) might have been elaborated. Some bibliographic omissions include Arthur Marotti's Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric; Paul Zumthor's Essai de poetique medievale; and much of Jacqueline Cerquiglini's work. A larger question that remains, for this reader, is that of the need to provide a context for why literary self-consciousness should be an important object of study. Beyond late twentieth- and twenty-first-century concerns, and beyond the desire to valorize these poets, what kind of literary (and cultural) history do these developments fit into, and what place should the Rhetoriqueurs hold in it?
Armstrong wants to set an example for scholarship, and he sets a good one, balancing painstaking codicological and bibliographic research with interpretive acuity and conceptual ambitions. If the book errs, and probably rightly, on the side of the former, it leaves some of its ambitions to be fulfilled, doubtless, in the author's future work.