A sequel to the authors' Arthurian Literature IV: Eleven Old French Narrative Lays (2007), this volume presents an edition and facing English translation of the three Old French lays in the title. But Professors Burgess and Brook have done considerably more than provide a critical edition of the texts with an accurate and readable translation. For each one, they have penned an unusually long and informative introduction. A good part of the introduction to the third text was composed by Elizabeth W. Poe, whose contribution the authors acknowledge on the title page and elsewhere. The book also contains an impressive bibliography and an index of proper names.
1. Ignaure
Ignaure is preserved in a single manuscript probably dating from 1285-90. Composed by a certain "Renaut," its author may or may not be the same Renaut (de Bâgé) who composed Le Bel Inconnu. The lay was first edited in 1832, and although it has appeared in various translations, the last published edition dates from 1938. As it is the first full-length example in medieval European literature of the eaten heart motif, it has received more critical attention than the other texts in this volume, and this new edition/translation will certainly ensure its continuing appeal.
Ignaure is a knight of lesser nobility who takes as a lover each of the beautiful and noble wives of twelve knights with whom he dwells in a castle in Brittany. He is able to operate unimpeded for about a year until, on the feast of St. John, the ladies decide to appoint one of their number as "priest" to hear each of the other ladies "confess" the name of her lover. When all name Ignaure, the ladies are outraged and decide to exact revenge. Ignaure, confident of his appeal (and their devotion) manages to convince them that he should be allowed to devote himself henceforth to a single woman; when pressed to make this difficult choice, he selects the "priest." One day, a losengier, who has overheard the conversation, tells the husbands that Ignaure has been cuckolding them. The man whose wife is now Ignaure's sole mistress surprises the couple in bed and seizes the knight. The twelve cuckolds then decide to remove Ignaure's heart and penis and have them prepared as a meal for their unfaithful wives, who have vowed not to eat until they learn the fate of Ignaure. Persuaded evntually to eat this special delicacy, the wives praise the quality of the food, but when they learn what they have eaten, all resolve never to eat again. They spend the rest of their short lives mourning at length Ignaure's excellent qualities and soon die. In a long epilogue, the author praises the lady who requested this lay, which he calls the lay of the Prisoner, stating that "it was composed for Ignaure, who was dismembered for love" (99).
The editors have written a remarkably long introduction to this lay. Its sixty-one pages cover the following topics: manuscripts, editions, translations; author and date; the poem's language and prosody; Ignaure's name and the title of the poem; a plot outline; structure, sources and analogues; characters and actions; themes; genre; and conclusion. (The section on themes jumps from subsection "a" to subsection "d", but this error appears to be a simple case of misnumbering.) The introduction is a precious resource for scholars researching the eaten heart motif, since the editors provide, in the section on sources and analogues, a fairly comprehensive survey, not only of the medieval eaten heart corpus and the eaten penis stories, but also of texts that bear some relation to these motifs, from the biblical story of Creation and the legend of Dionysus to the Comtesse d'Aulnoy's Mémoires de la cour d'Espagne. All of the texts surveyed include many of the following themes associated with the eaten heart motif: sexuality, transgression, murder, eating, cannibalism, vengeance, suicide, and knowledge. They are combined within a structure that underscores the excessive cruelty of the cuckolded husband and the continuing devotion of the wife, who often vows never to eat another meal, ensuring that she will follow her lover in death. For each of the texts in their survey, Burgess and Brook summarize the plot and list the various themes it shares with Ignaure. Although this procedure eventually becomes somewhat tedious, the reader is grateful for the wealth of information provided, which forms the base line for future study of these texts as they relate to the eaten heart motif.
2. Oiselet
Oiselet, the second lay in this collection, also features a long introduction covering most of the same topics as for the previous lay. However, unlike Ignaure, this early thirteenth-century lay is preserved in five manuscripts dating from the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth centuries. First published in 1756, it has been the object of several editions and translations (into English, French, German, and Dutch). It is one of the earliest Old French narratives to have been adapted into English; William Caxton published John Lydgate's The Churl and the Bird around 1478, and in Appendix III of their volume, Burgess and Brook have included a version of this poem adapted from the Early English Text Society edition, ed. Henry Noble McCracken and Merriam Sherwood (1961).
Oiselet tells of a rich vilain who has bought from nobler and more worthy predecessors a manor with a magic garden filled with fruits, flowers, herbs, and spices whose scents have healing powers. A little bird visits the garden twice daily, and from his perch in a beautiful pine tree issue wondrous songs that can cheer and rejuvenate people and inspire love. Above all, the bird's song is needed to sustain the vegetation. One morning, he sings a song exhorting maidens to cherish, worship, and obey God, who is in accord with true lovers. But upon spotting the vilain he changes his song, urging the estate to fall into ruin and showing contempt for its owner because of his mercenary nature. The vilain traps the bird, who then refuses to sing while in captivity. To gain his release, he promises to divulge three secret truths: Don't weep for what you never had, Don't believe all you hear, and What you hold in your hand you should not throw down at your feet. The vilain angrily dismisses all three, claiming he already knows them, but when the bird, now free, tells him that his little body contains a valuable stone weighing 3 ounces, the vilain tortures himself in despair, only to hear the bird inform him that it was a lie, and that he should have believed the first two truths. The bird flies off, leaving the garden to wither away. The moral of the story is "Whoever covets all, loses all" (167).
The five manuscripts containing the lay fall into two groups, according to the order of the three truths that the little bird promises to tell the vilain to win his release following his capture: MSS SAD are known as the pleurer-croire set, and MSS CE as the croire-pleurer set. The editors have chosen to edit MS S, which they consider to be the best in the SAD tradition, but for the section on the three truths, they have also included an edition/translation of MS C. Given this complex manuscript tradition, the editors have included in Appendix I a table of correspondence of lines between MS S and MSS ADCE. In Appendix II they have provided an edition of MS C; although they do not translate this text, they indicate in the margin the corresponding lines in MS S.
3. Amours
Amours, the third text in the volume, was probably composed in the late twelfth or first half of the thirteenth century by an unidentified author who calls himself Girart. Extant in a single manuscript, it has been edited only once before, by Gaston Paris in 1878. Unlike the other two texts in the volume, it is debatable whether or not Amours can be considered a lay, since it is actually a salut d'amour, or verse love letter. Although the editors feel justified in calling it a lay, in part because the author seems to refer to it as such, they note that it lacks many of the features related to fin'amor that a courtly audience would appreciate. Thus, they conclude that it is a very different kind of lay, and since it might be considered a manual for conducting a love affair, it would have appealed to an urban audience "convinced of the potential for written communication to improve their love life" (223).
The poet Girart, who names himself at the end, claims to be in the service of a certain high-born man whose love affair, we soon learn, he is recording as it unfolds. The man travels to a foreign country where he meets a lady at an assembly. The two fall in love at first sight, and after the usual hesitations, the lady, endowed with the greater initiative of the two, confesses her love first, followed by the man. When the noble man is summoned home, the lovers promise to write, and from this point on, the poem recounts the exchange of reflections on their love, which are dispatched by a messenger. On arriving home, the man writes to reiterate his love and reflect on the fusion of their two hearts. In her response, the lady expresses her appreciation of his reflections and looks forward to a night of love. The man sends back replies in the form of two lengthy monologues. In the first, he reflects further on the fusion of their two hearts and the wound made by love's arrow and recalls her bold invitation. In the second, he analyzes the supposed tension between his heart's impatience to be with her and his body's apparent indifference and looks forward to his impending visit. A further letter announces his intention to visit, and the poem ends with the man awaiting his lady's response. The poet makes it clear that he is dependent on the lovers' written reflections in order to continue his lay.
The introduction to this text contains many of the topics covered in the previous introductions, but with rather different emphases. The section on sources and analogues is necessarily spare: since so little has been written about this text, very few analogues have been identified, although the themes contained in the lovers' reflections are quite common. The section on genre and a new one called "Amours and the salut d'amour" are of particular interest. In the section on style, we learn that the text exhibits a certain lack of uniformity, in part because it may be the work of two authors. But if it is that of a single author, which is more likely, the intention may have been to show how Girart, the canny clerk, could vary his style to fit different modes (narrative, dramatic, epistolary) and how he might have sought to adopt a more "feminine" style when reporting the utterances of the Lady.
The insightful literary discussion contained in this introduction was contributed by Elizabeth Poe, who draws attention to the complexity of this fascinating text. For example, "Girart" is actually invested with a triple role, that of author, narrator, and clerk, and it is difficult to know where the monologues attributed to the noble man leave off and the text of each of his two letters begins. Indeed, there is evidence that the noble man, who appears to be much less versed in love than his beloved, feels incapable of what he calls "lofty" discourse and must have his clerk do much more than simply take dictation: most likely, Girart the clerk must compose the feelings expressed in the noble man’s letters.
Throughout their volume, Professors Burgess and Brook have provided line-by-line translations that are both accurate and fluid. They attempt to imitate the style of the original texts, wherever it is possible to do so without affecting the translation's readability. Although I was not able to check their editions against the various manuscripts, the meticulous notes that accompany their texts are testimony to the impressive amount of research that the authors have put into their book. Besides listing the MS variants at the bottom of each page, in a lengthy section on notes the authors scrupulously record the readings of earlier editors and even make multiple references to previous translations.
In short, The Old French Lays of Ignaure, Oiselet and Amours is a most welcome addition to our growing store of critical editions and translations of Old French texts. Whereas the lays of Marie de France have been the object of several editions and translations, not to mention countless books and articles, the other Breton lays have not yet garnered the attention they deserve. Therefore, the two sets of critical editions with facing English translations published by Burgess and Brook, and the volume compiled by Burgess in 1995, The Old French Narrative Lay: An Analytical Bibliography, are valuable resources indeed for scholars interested in pursuing further study of these very appealing Breton lays.