French Studies 54
54 French Studies EARLY MEDIEVAL LITERATURE By A. E. Cobby, University of Cambridge, and Finn E. Sinclair 1. General Alain Corbellari, Joseph Be´dier: ´ecrivain et philologue (PRF, 220), xxv + 765 pp., is a monumental assessment of the life, works and influence of the great philologist. It includes a bibliographie raisonne´e of B.’s writings and of their reviews, his genealogy, and a number of unpublished texts and fragments, mostly critical but including a three-act play, ‘La Le´gende des Aliscamps’. Pierre Jonin, L’Europe en vers au moyen aˆge: essai de the´matique (Nouvelle Bibliothe`que du Moyen Age, 35), Champion, 1996, 845 pp., is an anthology of some 500 thematically arranged excerpts from medieval verse literature in many languages, French being the most heavily represented. Its purpose is to facilitate cross-cultural comparison, and several 20th-c. poems are included to this end. Each of the 71 themes is discussed in an introductory ‘The´matique’ section, which is followed by the textual section in which short (one-page or less) extracts are presented in modern French, together with contextual summaries. There are several indices. Dietmar Rieger, Chanter et dire: ´etudes sur la litte´rature du moyen aˆge, Champion, 297 pp., reprints 14 articles on a wide range of subjects published from 1979 to 1995, some originally in German but all now translated. Rossi, Jongleurs, includes: M. Zink, ‘Contorsions jongleresques’ (5–8), an attempt to rehabilitate the jongleur; L. Rossi, ‘Jean Bodel: des flabiaus a` la chanson de geste’ (9–42), which probes Bodel’s understanding of the genres to which he was adding and his self-presentation as a jongleur, viewing his whole work as a representa- tion of jongleurs; C.
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