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 It includes a bibliographie raisonne´e of B.’s writings and of their reviews, his genealogy, and a number of unpublished texts and fragments, mostly critical but including a three-act play, ‘La Le´gende des Aliscamps’.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. Jacob-Hugon, ‘Pour une lecture ‘‘jongleresque’’ de la Chanson des Saisnes’(43–57), a reading which reveals at the same time an experienced epic jongleur, a master of the oral style, and an intellectual with a critical attitude to his sources; and R. E. F. Straub, ‘Un amusement jongleresque: le De´bat du Cul et du Con’(59–72), who sees this text as a summa of erotic metaphors and motifs found also in romance and fabliaux. J. W. Baldwin, ‘The image of the jongleur in northern France around 1200’, Speculum, 72:635–63, uses Latin and French texts (the latter by Jean Renart, Gerbert de Montreuil and Gace Brule´), to trace the various functions of the jongleur (performative, musical, literary), the centrality of music and, behind the literary references, the historical reality. The clarity of the French image contrasts with the shadowy figure found in contemporary Latin chronicles. B. concludes that the romance portrayal of the jongleur is historically accurate. Cahiers de Recherches Me´die´vales (XIIIe-XVe s.), 2, Early Medieval Literature 55 1996, entitled Regards sur le Moyen Age, has several articles on modern interpretations of the Middle Ages: S. Baudelle-Michels, ‘Une relecture de Renaut de Montauban:leJeu des Quatre Fils Aymon (1941)’ (25–35), on a play by Herman Closson performed in occupied Brussels; W. Lucas, ‘Re´ception de la litte´rature me´die´vale a` travers le me´dium cine´matographique’ (149–53), a brief piece mostly on the US commercial film; F. Amy de la Brete`que, ‘Pre´sence de la litte´rature franc¸aise du moyen aˆge dans le cine´ma franc¸ais’ (155–65), a more penetrating study of early 20th-c. French exploitation of the Middle Ages as a cultural intertext; and C. Ridoux, ‘La nouvelle e´cole de philologie romane et sa perception de la litte´rature me´die´vale’ (187–98), on the attitudes of the 19th-c. philologists to various texts and on the two tendencies in their work, pure philology and literary history. J. E. Burns et al., ‘Feminism and the discipline of Old French Studies: ‘‘Une bele disjointure’’ ’, Bloch, Medievalism, 225–66, point to the ambiguous position of the feminist medievalist, caught between the shifting subjectivities of the present and the elusiveness of textuality and identity in the past. Emphasis is placed on the complex interrelation between feminine representation and female identity in the context of epic and lyric texts. Theorizing a new reading of ‘woman’ challenges medievalists to look beyond the traditional analytical categories of the discipline. Chance, Gender, is, despite its title, a collection of articles on a range of selected women authors, from the 8th to the 15th c., including the trobairitz and women mystics as well as Marie de France and Christine de Pizan. These authors wrote either in Latin or in the vernacular, in various European countries. The themes of the sections hold the work together, essays being divided into three: ‘M/F: Authority, Domination, Misogyny’, ‘Autohagiography and Self-Mimesis: The Construction of Female Subjectivity’ and ‘Speaking the Body: Transhumanization and Subversion’. Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. Thomas J. Farrell, Gainesville, Florida U.P., 1996, 240 pp., addresses theory as much as Medieval Studies, relating the flexibility of Bakhtin’s terminology to the unclassifiable nature of medieval texts in regard to genre. A range of essays fall into three sections: ‘Carnival Voices in Medieval Texts’, ‘Multiple Voices in Medieval Texts’, and ‘Dissenting Voices with Bakhtin’. Sun Hee Kim Gertz, *Poetic Prologues: Medieval Conversations with the Literary Past, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1996. S. G. Nichols, ‘Modernism and the politics of medieval studies’, Bloch, Medievalism, 25–56, views modernism as the ‘hidden agenda’ of medieval studies in the late 19th century. The new role played by philology and the emphasis on ‘le dit’ (the said) instead of on ‘le dire’ (the performative act and.