This interesting collection of ten essays has, as the editors admit (vii), been a long time in preparation. However, although the volume has no separate bibliography, the references in endnotes show that supporting scholarship has been kept up to date. The central premise of the volume, explored from many angles and across various genres of Old and Middle French literature, is that literary characters, like human beings in the extratextual world, exist within and outwith social and ethnic groups and have within themselves multiple personas, often alien to each other. It is these shifts, exercised consciously or experienced unconsciously, as individuals move between groups and/or evolve over place and time, which construct that complex notion labelled "identity." Adrian P. Tudor and Kristin L. Burr explore these central concepts in the first part of their introduction to the volume (1-10); the rest of the introduction is given over, as has become normal in collaborative volumes, to brief abstracts of the individual contributions (10-14). An important tenet of the volume, as set out by Tudor and Burr, is that characters like people can occupy multiple positions, being, in the editors' words, "Other or not Other or Other Within--or indeed Others Within or even Other Without" (2). The concept "Other Within," which provides the subtitle of the volume, is itself a complex one. It may refer to a character who has changed community, or who has to balance friendship--compagnonnage--against membership of a wider community, to a character with conflicting, perhaps to a Manichaean extent, personality components, to a poetic I presenting shifting perspectives. All of these possibilities of interpretation are represented in the ten essays of the volume.
Within the theoretical part of their introduction Tudor and Burr give a number of examples to elucidate their ideas. The first of these is Perceval from Le Conte du graal of Chrétien de Troyes. According to Tudor and Burr, at the beginning of the romance he is "hunting alone in the forest, entirely absorbed in his own pursuits" (1-2); in fact, although he is practising throwing his javelins--which will stand him in good stead later when he kills the Chevalier Vermeil in a very unknightly way--he is not hunting, nor is he totally self-absorbed: he has ridden out from his mother's manor to visit her farm workers who are preparing fields of oats. Also, the only reference to the forest comes as part of what appears to be a byname given by we know not whom to his mother: "la veuve dame de la gaste forest" (the widowed lady of the forest waste), Le Conte du graal, ed. Charles Méla (Paris, 1994), lines 72-73. One further notices a similar problem of interpretation in other examples discussed. For instance the mappa mundi, housed in Hereford cathedral and possibly produced in that area of England, is referred to as an "Anglo-Norman artefact" (3), presumably on the basis that a number of marginal annotations are in insular French; however, it is far from accurate to state, as do Tudor and Burr, that "Marginal commentaries and most other textual aspects of the Hereford Mappa Mundi are in French" (2); most of the text on the map is Latin. Nor is the assertion correct that French was "the native language of those who commissioned and used it" (2-3). By ca. 1300, the probable date of the map, French (in its insular dialect) was not the native language of the noble and clerical classes in England, but an acquired cultural language.
Douglas Kelly, "The Medieval Moi Multiple: Names, Surnames and Personifications" (15-29), begins and ends with François Villon, who projects different aspects of his poetic persona onto Paris and its inhabitants. In between Kelly considers the use of names of various sorts in a variety of courtly and religious texts, although his use of English "surname" is potentially misleading--the Old French sornom is better rendered for a contemporary Anglophone reader as "byname" or "nickname." Kelly starts his investigation with Le Conte du graal, and oddly repeats a view we have seen in the introduction when, moving on to the Roman de la rose by Guillaume de Lorris, he categorises the garden in which personifications of the courtly virtues are assembled as "far different from the wild, unpopulated forest of Perceval's childhood" (18). While ranging across an impressive number of works by authors including Raoul de Houdenc and Christine de Pizan, Kelly uses "surname" to cover very diverse ways of naming, but particularly using it in the context of allegorisations of human attributes, underscoring his central thesis of the mutability of the self across time and space.
Jane H. M. Taylor, "'Je vueil ung livre commencier': The Otherness of Othon de Grandson's 'Je'" (30-41), explores the varied projections of the poet's persona, setting Grandson's complex Livre Messire Ode in the traditions of the Roman de la rose, of Machaut's Voir Dit, and of the dits of Froissart; in the final debate between the poet's heart and his body, it looks ahead to the more famous Débat du Cueur et du Corps of François Villon. However, as Taylor points out (33), the world of Grandson's dream vision is a wholly human one without the personified abstracts of Guillaume de Lorris's poem. Taylor sees his use of stock figures from the tradition, such as Dangier and Reffuz, as invitations to read between the lines to appreciate how Grandson introduces aesthetic distance into his work. The nearest he comes to a conventional allegory is in the persona of a young squire who has lost in quick succession three birds of prey: a sparrowhawk, a peregrine falcon and a tercelet, all birds figuring the participants in poetic love affairs from the twelfth century on. Taylor's presentation of the various squires, including the one lamenting lost hawks, and other participants in Grandson's Livre Messire Ode as distancing devices enabling him to explore aspects of his own persona, is carefully and convincingly done.
In William Burgwinkle, "Huon de Bordeaux: The Cultural Dream as Palimpsest" (42-52), "palimpsest" is to be taken as referring to the multiple levels of reading that Burgwinkle finds in the poem. Assuming that most readers of the current collection will not be familiar with it, he gives a brief summary of the plot (43-45). His dating of the poem--"Huon de Bordeaux was composed around 1225" (42)--is arbitrary and apparently related to his interpretations of the poem. It is true that the range of dates proposed for Huon de Bordeaux is wide: the earliest terminus a quo given is 1216 by Michel Raby in his PhD thesis and subsequent publication of the Huon de Bordeaux en prose, but in this we should note that Raby is supporting a date given by his thesis director, Richard O'Gorman; the later dating by Marguerite Rossi, between 1259 and 1268, is now more generally accepted, including by the editors of the text that Burgwinkle takes as the basis of his study: Huon de Bordeaux, ed. and trans. William W. Kibler and François Suard (Paris 2003), who date their text to "quelques années après 1260" (xxii). By an unfortunate misprint Burgwinkle makes this "a few years after 1268" (160, n. 1). The multiple themes he finds in the poem are well summed up by Burgwinkle as "thirteenth-century anxieties about religious identity, sexual identity, linguistic and ethnic identity, and the rights that accompany them" (51), all written into a myth-history of Western Christianity reclaiming for itself the lands of Islam.
In Kristin L. Burr, "Ringing True: Shifting Identity in Le Roman de la Violette" (53-66), the first word of the title refers not to a bell but to a finger ring confirming fidelity. Her analysis of the romance focuses mainly on the heroine, Euriaut, who has to adopt multiple disguises to avoid the unwanted attentions of lubricious males and preserve her fidelity to the hero, Gerard, who himself goes through a number of adventures provoking what Burr calls "identity crisis" (58). Ultimately reunited and reintegrated into courtly society, the couple have repeatedly and separately moved in and out of this world, imposing on themselves or having imposed on them an Otherness which overlays their essence asfins amants and enables them to survive the mishaps of their adventures. While Burr acknowledges the debt of Gerbert de Montreuil to the Roman de la rose ou de Guillaume de Dole of Jean Renart (62), she does not note how much La Violette owes to, and is in debate with, Renart's other works, L'Escoufle and Le Lai de L'Ombre, or indeed to the Tristan legend.
Sara I. James, "Inside Out and Outside In: (Re-)reading the Other in the Guillaume Cycle" (67-78), deals predominantly with the complex situation of Orable-Guibourc (the Saracen princess of Orange who became Guillaume's wife) and Rainouart (the Saracen giant who becomes a major ally of the Christians) caught between two societies and two religions. Although James has a good range of reference for her essay, it is a pity that she seems not to have known Micheline de Combarieu du Grès, "Les 'nouveaux' chrétiens: Guibourc et Rainouart dans Aliscans," in Mourir aux Aliscans, ed. Jean Dufournet, Collection Unichamp 39 (Paris, 1993), pp. 55-77. Throughout the essay she also treats Rainouart as if he was a Christian from the start; he may have been a "crypto-Christian" through much of the second part of the Chanson de Guillaume and Aliscans, but by his own admission he has never been baptised or entered a church, andit is only at the very end of these poems that he is finally baptised and becomes formally a Christian. We should also note that in dealing with Guillaume's confrontation with his sister when soliciting the aid of the emperor Louis for the defence of Orange (77), James conflates the two divergent versions of the Chanson de Guillaume and Aliscans. There is also one unfortunate mistranslation of Guillaume, line 686, "Ore gardez, pur Deu, qu'ele ne seit perdue," translated as "Take care, for God's sake, that she not be lost," suggesting that it is Guibourc who may be lost, whereas the feminine pronoun refers back to "nurreture" (line 684)--the care and upbringing which Guibourc, not yet identified with Orable in this early poem, gave to her now dying nephew Vivien.
Jane Gilbert, "Ami et Amile and Jean-Luc Nancy: Friendship versus Community?" (79-91), begins by reminding readers that epic heroes by their nature are always outsiders in their communities: it is only secondary supporting characters--their adjuvants--who may be considered as assimilated insiders. Gilbert's analyses Ami et Amile, showing that the relationship of these "mystical twins" raises tensions at all levels of the groups to which they belong. Most importantly, and this is the central topic of her essay, the poem portrays the conflicting claims of the couple's friendship and of the broader community to which they belong. Gilbert first reads the chanson de geste through the lens of the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, but then, in a reversal not common among literary scholars exploiting theoreticians, uses the medieval epic to criticise aspects of Nancy's work.
Francis Gingras, "The Devil Inside: Merlin and the Dark Side of Romance" (92-106), considers, from the earliest texts to mention him to thirteenth-century romances, the supernatural conception of Merlin, from a succubus and a pure woman, and the role of his magic in the conception, birth and upbringing of Arthur. Gingras develops his analysis of various texts, mostly of the thirteenth century, to consider the ways in which authors moved from writing the past as history to writing it as myth or fiction. There are a few minor problems with Gingras's text. He refers to Wace as "Anglo-Norman" (93): he was a Jerseyman, so continental Norman; his treatment of the Welsh poet Taliesin as a "legendary bard" (94) raises many questions; his translation of the adjective "sains" in a quotation from Claris et Laris is problematic: the lines read "Le voir dire ne m'est pas sains, / Martyr seroie, non pas sains"; his translation imposes on the writer a simple repetition in his rhyme, but in the second line "sains" appears to mean "saintly / holy."
James R. Simpson, "Melly and Merlin: Locating Little Voices in BnF fr. 24432" (107-120), ranges over a number of texts and commentators in analysing the tale Merlin Mellot by Jehan de Saint-Quentin; "Melly" in the article's title is Simpson's rendering of the French diminutive "Mellot." The tale is a version of a peasant's inability to keep to the conditions of a contract made, here with the magician Merlin, so producing his own downfall. The view of peasants as natural outsiders to the Church and wider community is debatable, and Simpson's conclusion that the manuscript is a form of "cultural reliquary" (120) is interesting, but, as he states earlier on the same page, requires much more investigation.
Adrian P. Tudor, "Sex, the Church and the Medieval Reader: Shaping Salvation in the Vie des Pères" (121-136), rightly comments on the importance of religious and hagiographical works in medieval France, an importance which scholars working in the systems of secular France in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played down in favour of works which could be seen as preparing, even at a great distance, the Enlightenment and modernity. Thirty-two of the tales in the post-Lateran IV Vie des Pères (123) deal with sexual matters as part of their place in "conversion literature," presenting characters who by their trajectory from sin to salvation naturally represent the Other Within (121). Tudor's analysis of these works is measured and convincing, especially in his notion of the Church imposing control of the community through confession. In this sound exposé one is surprised to find a serious mistranslation in his discussion of Nièce (132): "Ileuc a toz s'abandona, / si ot de li qui li dona" is not "In that place she gave herself completely, taking whatever was given to her" but "In that place she gave herself up to everyone, and anyone who gave her anything had what he wanted of her."
Mary Jane Schenck, "Roland's Confession and the Rhetorical Construction of the Other Within" (137-150) starts, like Tudor, from the premise that the fourth Lateran Council (1215), with its insistence on confession, changed the way sin was considered and helped the development of a sense of interiority of the individual. In the light of this, Schenck very ably traces the evolution of the hero's death scene from the twelfth-century Oxford text of the Chanson de Roland, through a thirteenth-century translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, to the version of the Roland in the late thirteenth-century Châteauroux manuscript. Schenck's text is marred by a few misprints that might have been picked up during proofreading, but fortunately none is serious enough to hinder appreciation of her argument.
While there is no clear structure to the ordering of the essays, taken as a whole they do offer a good conspectus, across four or five centuries and a wide range of genres, of the book's theme.