Karen Pratt

The Lancelot-Grail cycle : text and transformations

The Lancelot-Grail Cycle is a seminal work in the development of the European medieval literatures right down to the Renaissance. For this reason, this volume will be compulsory reading for a wide audience interested in medieval matters, history, linguistics and belles lettres, and literary criticism. --Carol R. Dover, assistant professor of French, Georgetown University Composed in Old French between about 1220 and 1240, the Lancelot-Grail Cycle is a group of five prose romances centered on the love affair between Lancelot and Guenevere. It consists of an immense central core, the Lancelot Proper, introduced by The History of the Holy Grail and The Story of Merlin and concluded by The Quest for the Holy Grail and The Death of Arthur. This volume brings together thirteen essays by noted scholars from the first symposium ever devoted exclusively to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Exploring the cycles evolution across the literatures of medieval France, Italy, Spain, Catalonia, and England, the authors take a variety of approaches that highlight a broad range of cultural, social, historical, and political concerns and offer a comparative and interdisciplinary vision of this great romance. William W. Kibler is the Superior Oil-Linward Shivers Centennial Professor of Medieval Studies and a professor of French at the University of Texas at Austin.

Linda Burke. The Book of Gladness/Le Livre de Leesce: A 14th Century Defense of Women, in English and French, by Jehan Le Fèvre. Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Linda Burke. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. 168 pp.

There is no doubt that Jehan Le Fèvre’s Livre de Leesce deserves to be much better known, especially given its key contribution to the debate about women in French and English latemedieval literature. Having translated the misogamous Lamentationes Matheoluli into French around 1370, Jean Le Fèvre de Ressons, a Parisian lawyer, produced in the 1380s a palinode, in which he marshaled an impressive set of profeminine arguments to counter Matheolus’s defamatory pronouncements. These arguments are later rehearsed in the defenses of women produced by Christine de Pizan, as well as in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Gower’s Confessio amantis. Drawing on her main expertise in Middle English, Linda Burke has provided in her scholarly annotations that accompany her translation a host of useful information on Le Fèvre’s sources and in particular on the reception of his work in English literature. However, although her translation of this challenging text has some merit, being largely accurate and readable, the Middle French text she includes is merely van Hamel’s 1882/1905 edition (available online), without its critical apparatus. This edition has all the faults of a late nineteenth-century product: it is a composite text in which editorial decisions are far from transparent. Moreover, it was based on only five manuscript witnesses, because the copy in the British Library, Royal 20B XXI, was unknown to van Hamel until quite late in the editing process, and even the Carpentras manuscript is used only sporadically. Burke mentions two more witnesses, those in Wolfenbüttel and Prague, of which van Hamel was unaware, yet she seems to be ignorant of a further one in Chantilly. These recent (re)discoveries fundamentally challenge the reliability of the text Burke has translated here, and therefore her edition and translation can only be considered provisional until a new edition, which I am preparing for the Pontifical Institute in Toronto, has been completed. In the Leesce, Le Fèvre’s method is to quote chunks of his Lamentations, particularly when retelling antifeminist exempla, which he then refutes. Several substantial passages within these misogynous sections were deemed by van Hamel to be interpolations, added by a scribe who had used the Lamentations to flesh out his version of Leesce. Because these passages appeared in only two of his manuscripts (London and Florence), van Hamel omitted them from his text, relegating them to the critical apparatus. However, it can be shown that the longer version of Leesce is closer to the original work, while the shorter version is the product of a clumsy abbreviator. For, not only does the shortened text fail to make complete sense, but also there are allusions later in the Leesce referring back to material that the overenthusiastic abbreviator had already excised. The Prague manuscript also contains the unabridged version, but Burke, not having consulted any of the manuscripts, is not aware of this and claims in note 8 of her introduction (ignoring the fact that van Hamel says in his introduction that these “scribal interpolations” were shared by the Florence and London manuscripts) that the longer version in the Florence manuscript is an exceptional case. Noting that passages based on the Lamentations are often incomprehensible, she provides substantial synopses of the exempla taken from the earlier antifeminist work as context for her translation of the Leesce. Her problem, however, would largely have been solved

Keeping Body and Soul Together: Gender, Sexuality and Salvation in the Works of Jean LeFévre de Ressons

In several of his works, La Vieille, Les Lamentations de Matheolus, Le Respit de la mort, Le Livre de Leesce Jean LeFevre raises theological issues surrounding virginity, marriage and homosexuality. There is, for example, a very interesting, comic dialogue between God and the narrator in the Lamentations on the relative merits of marriage and virginity, and on the thorny question of what will happen to women if Adam gets his rib back after the Last Judgement. In La Vieille, based on the pseudo-Ovidian de vetula, the disqualification of eunuchs from the priesthood is discussed. In analysing his writings, both original and translated, serious and comic, this essay considers Jean LeFevre’s treatment and linguistic elaboration of the interaction between body and soul, placing his works within the context of philosophical and theological debates on sexuality and salvation in 14th-century France.

The Strains of Defense: The Many Voices of Jean Lefèvre’s Livre de Leesce

Although in his Livre de Leesce Jean LeFevre enters the debate about women apparently supporting the female cause, his playful use of voice and intertextual allusion undermine the authority of his female advocate for women and reveal a tongue-in-cheek approach, no doubt designed to amuse a male audience rather than the ladies of Paris he invokes.