The Roman de Renart is no roman at all, but a collection of individual stories, linked by common characters, almost all of them personified animals and featuring a fox, Renart, as the prime mover. It would be a misnomer to call Renart the hero -- he is more of an antihero, but Renart is the central character in the entire collection of some twenty-seven stories collected, adding up to some 30,000 lines, in numerous medieval manuscripts.
The text is well-known, but the originality of Lodge and Varty's edition lies in the fact that the manuscript presented here had not been previously edited. This latest edition of the earliest branches of the Roman de Renart brings to the public their interpretation of one manuscript tradition. But the editors have other goals as well, notably to produce an edition of the text for English-speaking student audiences, a classroom edition of this important medieval narrative fabric.
Ernest Martin was the first scholar to dub the different stories "branches," thinking of a tree structure, though I am not convinced that the simile holds. Nonetheless, the nomenclature has stuck. Lodge and Varty present in this edition branches II-Va, using the numbering instituted by Martin in 1882. Lodge and Varty rightly note that the three major manuscript traditions of the Renart story have been carefully edited over the years (the alpha family by Ernest Martin, 1882- 1887; the beta family by Mario Roques, 1948-1963; gamma by Naoyuki Fukumoto et al., 1983- 1985, although based on manuscript C; and independent manuscript H by Armand Strubel et al., 1998) and so chose to devote their efforts to a lesser known and not previously-published witness to the stories, gamma manuscript M, Turin, Biblioteca Reale, Varia 151. From M, Lodge and Varty present the parts known as the Prologue, Chantecler, Mésange, Tibert, Tiécelin, Hersent, Plaintes/Serment, Dénouement 1 and 2, followed by 45 pages of detailed notes and a very complete glossary.
Because students are an intended audience for this volume, the introduction to the edition is lengthy, at over 100 pages. Here, the editors discuss in detail the history of the Renart story, the manuscript families and their relationships, the date and authorship of the stories included in the edition. Provided are antecedents and analogs for each of the edition's tales, sometimes quoted in entirety. The student audience is always in the mind of the editors, who offer useful analyses of their texts (I particularly liked the way Chantecler was presented) but who go so far as to explain, at the beginning of the Variants, "The abbreviation om = omitted, not present in the manuscript" (3).
There is a careful discussion of the language of the text, using the linguistic atlas of medieval French published by Anthonij Dees (Atlas des formes ...des chartes françaises du 13e siècle, Beiheft zur ZRP 1987) to good effect, demonstrating that the author of the first texts of the Roman de Renart (whom Lodge and Varty prefer not to identify with Pierre de Saint-Cloud) was probably from the region of Orleans, although the evidence is not conclusive. The editors use a statistical analysis to demonstrate that Chantecler was probably written by a different author than the other branches in their volume, although they are hesitant, based on the evidence presented, to state that Lucien Foulet's theory of a single author, be he Pierre de Saint-Cloud or someone else, for all these branches is wrong. The introduction and the notes discuss in detail linguistic, philosophic and political issues in the text.
The edition itself, 2826 lines of text, is neatly set on the page; the reader is provided corresponding line numbers to the editions of the same passages by Mario Roques and Ernest Martin where appropriate. Variants are separated according to source manuscript and organized in columns by manuscript (M, C, and n, the three manuscripts of the gamma family), so that it is easy to see which witness provides which reading. Furthermore, because of the presentation of the variant readings, it is very clear what each manuscript says. The editors are to be commended for this effort, which eases the life of students and scholars alike.
The Notes offer explanations that may include detailed translations of difficult passages, editorial comments on authorial references, and lengthy explanations for students, providing a real introduction to medieval life and society. Examples of this sort of elucidation, taken at random, include the note to l. 14 on the use of Arabic and Roman numerals in medieval Europe or the note to l. 2050 on the different legal systems of different parts of France. The scholarship of Lodge and Varty demonstrated here is noteworthy.
On to the criticisms. I confess that I was a bit disconcerted by the typos I found. Missing closing parentheses on pages with numerical data (lxxiii, lxxv) made it harder to understand the numbers; there were typos in the bibliography (for primarly read primarily; manuscript read manuscrit, argument read arguments). In the introduction to the Index of Proper Names, typos are sufficiently annoying to cause this reader to question the care with which this part of the volume was put together (missing initial "T" on two paragraphs, missing periods on any number of abbreviated first names). The bibliography offers 83 items of interest to students of the stories told here, and most of the entries have a brief commentary informing the reader of the arguments presented or the general merit of the piece. However, not all the items listed have such a commentary. While this is not an issue with articles and books easily found, is such the case with E.C. Johnston's "The Medieval Versions of the Reynard and Chanticler Episode," published in USF-Language Quarterly (1966) (item number 57)? Perhaps Lodge and Varty's students had easy access to this periodical; I think that most undergraduates won't and that that audience (and this reader) would appreciate a summary of Johnston's ideas. The same can be said for H. Bihler's "Zur Gestalt mittelalterlicher lateinischer, französischer und spanischer Fassung der Fable vom Fuchs und Raben," published in a festschrift for Hans Rheinfelder in 1963 (bibliographic item number 64), perhaps even more so as this article is in German. One last observation. The volume is arranged as one might expect for the edition of a text: introduction, text, notes, index of proper names and glossary. But there is no Table of Contents, which would have been useful to assist the reader in navigating through the lengthy introductory material, nor is there a general index either to the introduction or to the notes, to assist the reader in finding again items noted on first read.
The editors present a volume that is pleasant to hold and highly informative. Despite my criticisms (and I would include price here as well), The Earliest Branches of the Roman de Renart would be a very useful student edition. Lodge and Varty's edition could serve, moreover, as the text for a course on medieval French language or medieval French society. I think it a worthwhile addition to the library of any scholar who wants a solid and informed English-language introduction to the Roman de Renart, and an accessible edition to the stories included here, which are some of the most important in the Renart saga.