Each year the announcement of the topics for the forthcoming agrégation plunges the French university sector into a fresh ferment of activity, and generates a flurry of publications for consumption by the vast captive market of anxious candidates and teachers. In 2002 Machaut's Voir Dit was the medieval set text in lettres françaises and this volume, consisting mostly of reprints or translations of already published essays on the Voir Dit, has been assembled with these readers in view.
Its contributions, arranged in chronological order, chart the reception of Machaut's chef d'oeuvre from Georg Hanf's seminal 1898 study onwards. With a battery of close textual argument, Hanf demolishes Paulin Paris's case for the poem being the record of an authentic correspondence and inaugurates the still prevailing reading of it as a masterly, self-conscious, multi-voiced fiction. This view is refracted through the ensuing essays which present samples from the work of significant Machaut critics: G. B. Gybbon Monnypenny on medieval autofiction, Sarah Jane Williams on the inset formes fixes and their music, Kevin Brownlee on Machaut's poetic artistry, Bill Calin on narrative technique, Friedrich Wolfzettel and Daniel Poirion on poetic modes of perception and imagination, Maureen Boulton on the ideology of form, Catherine Attwood on the personification of Souvenir and its associated themes, and Nicole Lassahn on the Voir Dit's historical and political dimension. Pride of place goes to Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, represented by no fewer than four essays in addition to the Preface, including her wonderful classic 'Le clerc et l'écriture' from the Grundriss and the powerfully suggestive 'Polyphème ou l'antre de la voix' from the Poirion mélanges.
As a teaching collection this is undoubtedly a useful volume. It covers a wide range of themes and makes accessible essays from some journals, conference proceedings and homage studies which one could expect to find only in a good research library. Whilst offering guidance on a series of questions relating specifically to the Voir Dit, it is far from narrow in focus but instead situates Machaut's poem in a series a different contexts (other works of Machaut, lyric poetry in the fourteenth century, quasi-autobiographical writings in other languages). There is nothing on gender -- gender criticism being relatively undeveloped in France, its presence would not help agrégation candidates to compose acceptable answers. Perhaps for copyright reasons, only free-standing pieces are included and this leads to certain critics being sold short when better instances of their Machaut criticism appeared in monographs. References to the text of the Voir Dit are expanded to include the recent Imbs-Cerquiglini edition, which was the prescribed edition for the agrégation, but is also now the one in widest use. Editorial input is otherwise minimal. For example, the criss-crossing of themes would be easier to track through the contributions had there been an index, and there is no mise au point of Machaut criticism. There are only two previously unpublished essays in the volume. Attwood's on Souvenir shows her fine appreciation of the period and a careful teasing out of thematic associations, though she steers clear of the more philosophical aspects of memory. Lassahn's essay skilfully lifts into the foreground of interpretation the political implications of the poet-patron relationship in the Voir Dit to restore the dimension of 'reality' within the fiction. Both essays deserve better than what is likely to prove a relatively ephemeral publication. The genre of the pièce de circonstance , so characteristic of the later Middle Ages, is with us still in books such as this.