La Vie de sainte Geneviève de Paris. Poème religieux by Lennart BohmReview by: F. J. WarneThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Jul., 1956), pp. 431-433Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3718410 .

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The present reviewer may be forgiven perhaps for finding some of the judgments in the central section on classical authors disturbing in what within the profession we might call their 'pre-Mornet' ring. Only in the case of Racine is artistic creation seriously brought into the discussion. Moliere's humanity is excellently praised but the reader is given no hint that he created a certain type of play that enlarged the limits of comedy, nor that La Rochefoucauld created the modern epigram. Both Sainte-Beuve and Andre Gide, not often found in company, would be horrified at the statement that La Rochefoucauld 'discovers nothing new', or at the definition of Pascal's wager as 'his symbol for man's policy of common sense calculation'. Is it not out-of-date to dismiss Pascal's defence of religion as out-of- date? What have the last seventy years of Pascalian studies been doing if not correcting this view?

'Periods of literary history are of course mainly abstractions' (p. 293). So most of us teach, but we shall find little support in the categories of this book. The time- honoured division by centuries is rigorously observed, untouched by the new work that has been done on generations. (Might not Thibaudet have found mention in the catalogue ?) A writer is given short shrift if he comes in a 'transitional' period or outside the usual compartments. Saint-Real is not included at all. Fontenelle is dismissed as a pleasant minor writer, one-third as important as Fenelon. And who would guess from the page on Renan that the Second Empire (another politi- cal concept not, I think, mentioned) has been called 'the age of Renan'?

But disagreement should not be the final note. It is only fair to the author to point out that in his Conclusion he has committed himself to the statement that 'the fate of France's literature is after all bound up with her national existence', and to enforce his final point, a note of alarm at the widening gulf between author and public. A scholar such as M. Cazamian who has studied a thousand years of two European literatures might be allowed a prophecy, but he contents himself with a charming phrase that rebukes our quick summaries of what is French: 'the only safe inference is that the variety of the human mind is far greater than the power of logic.' OXFORD W.G. GMOORE OXFORD

La Vie de sainte Genevieve de Paris. Poeme religieux. Edited by LENNART BOHM. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell. 1955. 267 pp.

This edition of a hitherto unpublished text is a curious mixture: an accurate presentation of the text of the saint's life (subject to reservations set out below)l with an introduction and notes which leave much to be desired from the point of view of the French in which they are expressed, and a glossary which could well have been pruned of numerous terms,2 more carefully considered in relating

1 The following points may be raised: 171 se: se would have been clearer. 184 riens nule: Transpose? 294 ferai possible, but sarai B (=serai A, i.e. analogical sairai) better; or is serai A correct, i.e. with novele =novice? 462-9: Punctuation breathless, better 465 comma, 466 comma or colon, 467 comma. 644 esfree: B and C suggest esfraee agreeing with la genz and rhyming with contree. 1035 qu'i li: Read qu'il i? 1132 efin: Read afin. 1711 li giue: Read li Giue. 1848 nome: Read nome. 1918 c'en (ce en A): The use of diaeresis in cases where final e does not elide would make this unnecessary. 2092 dames: Read dame B. 2332 que ele: The scribe's quele, i.e. qu'ele was correct; if que is qua, the line has now nine syllables (Contrast suppression of e of que in 3235). 2443 Comma at end. 2557 The ingenious explanation of this line on p. 79 is unnecessary, the line having one et too many; read: Voiles et sigles, maz et tres, these things going naturally by pairs. 2747 Cest? Read C'est. 3567 vit: scribal misreading of jut, seeing that the relics, not the living saint, are involved? 3614 Comma, not full stop.

2 E.g. (words mainly left untranslated in the Glossary): ami(e), assaillir, aube, baniere, baptesme, ble, bois, cent, chanoine, chevron, etc.

The present reviewer may be forgiven perhaps for finding some of the judgments in the central section on classical authors disturbing in what within the profession we might call their 'pre-Mornet' ring. Only in the case of Racine is artistic creation seriously brought into the discussion. Moliere's humanity is excellently praised but the reader is given no hint that he created a certain type of play that enlarged the limits of comedy, nor that La Rochefoucauld created the modern epigram. Both Sainte-Beuve and Andre Gide, not often found in company, would be horrified at the statement that La Rochefoucauld 'discovers nothing new', or at the definition of Pascal's wager as 'his symbol for man's policy of common sense calculation'. Is it not out-of-date to dismiss Pascal's defence of religion as out-of- date? What have the last seventy years of Pascalian studies been doing if not correcting this view?

'Periods of literary history are of course mainly abstractions' (p. 293). So most of us teach, but we shall find little support in the categories of this book. The time- honoured division by centuries is rigorously observed, untouched by the new work that has been done on generations. (Might not Thibaudet have found mention in the catalogue ?) A writer is given short shrift if he comes in a 'transitional' period or outside the usual compartments. Saint-Real is not included at all. Fontenelle is dismissed as a pleasant minor writer, one-third as important as Fenelon. And who would guess from the page on Renan that the Second Empire (another politi- cal concept not, I think, mentioned) has been called 'the age of Renan'?

But disagreement should not be the final note. It is only fair to the author to point out that in his Conclusion he has committed himself to the statement that 'the fate of France's literature is after all bound up with her national existence', and to enforce his final point, a note of alarm at the widening gulf between author and public. A scholar such as M. Cazamian who has studied a thousand years of two European literatures might be allowed a prophecy, but he contents himself with a charming phrase that rebukes our quick summaries of what is French: 'the only safe inference is that the variety of the human mind is far greater than the power of logic.' OXFORD W.G. GMOORE OXFORD

La Vie de sainte Genevieve de Paris. Poeme religieux. Edited by LENNART BOHM. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell. 1955. 267 pp.

This edition of a hitherto unpublished text is a curious mixture: an accurate presentation of the text of the saint's life (subject to reservations set out below)l with an introduction and notes which leave much to be desired from the point of view of the French in which they are expressed, and a glossary which could well have been pruned of numerous terms,2 more carefully considered in relating

1 The following points may be raised: 171 se: se would have been clearer. 184 riens nule: Transpose? 294 ferai possible, but sarai B (=serai A, i.e. analogical sairai) better; or is serai A correct, i.e. with novele =novice? 462-9: Punctuation breathless, better 465 comma, 466 comma or colon, 467 comma. 644 esfree: B and C suggest esfraee agreeing with la genz and rhyming with contree. 1035 qu'i li: Read qu'il i? 1132 efin: Read afin. 1711 li giue: Read li Giue. 1848 nome: Read nome. 1918 c'en (ce en A): The use of diaeresis in cases where final e does not elide would make this unnecessary. 2092 dames: Read dame B. 2332 que ele: The scribe's quele, i.e. qu'ele was correct; if que is qua, the line has now nine syllables (Contrast suppression of e of que in 3235). 2443 Comma at end. 2557 The ingenious explanation of this line on p. 79 is unnecessary, the line having one et too many; read: Voiles et sigles, maz et tres, these things going naturally by pairs. 2747 Cest? Read C'est. 3567 vit: scribal misreading of jut, seeing that the relics, not the living saint, are involved? 3614 Comma, not full stop.

2 E.g. (words mainly left untranslated in the Glossary): ami(e), assaillir, aube, baniere, baptesme, ble, bois, cent, chanoine, chevron, etc.

Reviews Reviews 431 431

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432 Reviews

meanings of words to context' and cross-referenced for widely divergent verbal forms and variants;2 there are also corrections3 to be made and omissions to be noted.4

Once one has become accustomed to the peculiarities of the editor's language and to the occasional quaintness of his technical terms, it is apparent that he has devoted much time and research to the material contained in the Introduction. His separation of the phonetic and morphological study of B and C from that of A by long discussions on sources, date, author, etc., leads to much turning of pages; he is obviously correct in his choice of A as base manuscript for his edition of the text and his detailed study of A is sound and clearly set out, though there are certain minor misconceptions and errors.5 The fact might well be stressed that, when the text under consideration is a copy, or, as it seems, a copy of a copy of the original, too much weight cannot be given to occasional dialectal characteristics: Renaud may have been Francien, Guerin or some other copyist Norman. Con- clusions as to date on the relative frequency of estovoir, covenir and falloir are, on the other hand, very much to the point.

In the discussion of sources, author and date (pp. 29-62), we have certain reservations to make, though, here too, the general argument is sound.6

The long argument about Eleanor of Vermandois (pp. 51-5) gets left in the air whilst we are regaled with the discovery of Petit's error about (Marizy-) Sainte-

1 The following corrections of meaning are obvious: acoillir: 422 s'emparer de, 423 entrer dans; acointe 194: relations charnelles; amembrer 3528, amentevoir 3472: both contexts suggest rappeler rather than mentionner; apaumi 2682: irregular past part. of apaumer (for rhyme with ami), toucher de la main (note and epuiser par l'approche de la mort are off the point); assez 509 etc.: tout a fait more often than beaucoup; dampnement 529: damnation, not condemnation; defoler 2585: maltraiter, not opprimer; desroi 1294: deraison, not orgueil, folie; escumer 2201: baver, not 6cumer; dechanter 1385: chanter jusqu'au bout, not chanter en faux bourdon; droituriere 268: loyal, fidele, not juste, sincere; eslever: 717 avancer, alleguer, 2161 augmenter, not elever; esmarriz 2570: chagrine, afflige, not trouble, 6gar6; enquerre 1949: implorer, not demander; faille 2615: sans f.: sans erreur, not sans doute; faillir 3002: ne pas reussir, not faire defaut, manquer; fauser 1945: tromper, not violer; foler 2295: tromper or (fouler) maltraiter, not opprimer; gratieux 100: en 6tat de grace, not gracieux; large 2152: large, i.e. gen6reux; mecine 2308: remede or enchantement, not medecine; plessier 1328: detruire, not abattre; poindre 2598: piquer, not exciter, pousser; puisier (no meaning given): faire eau (d'un navire); requerre 1953: V. enquerre; sordiacre 2010: premier diacre, not sousdiacre.

2 The following, given only under the word in italics in brackets, should have been cross- referenced: aiue 2244 (eue); aquelt 3452 (acoillir); cope 2157 (colpe); coile 1913 (celer); creue 1448 (croistre); destroiz 2022 (destraindre); elz 109 (oil); griet 2989 (grever); hace 2166, het 2159 (hair); lui 3582 (lire); merra 2987 (mener); oille 2315, oile 2595 (uile); pert 2286 (paroir); poist 2989 (peser); prit 3589 (prier); remes 2056 (remanoir); resoscit 3612 (resusciter, but similar forms suggest an alternative resosciter); ruis 599 (rover); sames 1329 (semer); tois 1184 (taire). Some of the infinitives (given in brackets in the Glossary) do not occur in the text.

3 Corrections: aiue 2244, eue 80 etc.: aive? eve?; el, as neuter only in Glossary, is more often ele contracted; monstres: text has mostres 1834; nais 707 is not past part. of nestre (Glossary), but <nativus, natif (de); covoitie 2111: not past part., but subst. from covoitier, i.e. convoitise; por: Glossary entries inadequate, cf. por lui 2058, 2064.

4 Omissions: absolu: joesdi...absolu 1709: jeudi saint; en, common spelling for on; froier (froiast 3237): frotter; mains 2100: moins; mate 1522: abattu, vaincu, triste; merir: add meri 532, p. passe; o 1262: oiu; travaillier: add refl. 2174: perdre sa peine. 5 On p. 69 rimes pauvres (simple identity of final vowel only) are apparently rimes sufftsantes. -Preeschier is not essential to the metre in v. 1237; -ier <-icare can be dissyllabic.-El for ele (p. 102) for metrical reasons is not necessarily Western French.-The observations about correct declension and the proper use of the flexional s (pp. 20-1, 23-4, 92), with the implication that correct usage may be expected in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (date of the copies used) or even in the early thirteenth century (supposed date of the original), seem unrealistic.

6 It is dangerous to rely upon vv. 2655-6: spurious claims about sources are a well-known trick to get authority for invention. Pp. 42-3: We fail to see why inversion of order of anecdotes should necessarily imply the use of a Latin text different from Latin MS. 5667; the author may have preferred the fragmentary, disjointed treatment which is the result.

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Genevieve and a consequent long discussion about the claims of a late thirteenth- century Renaut and about Yolande of Burgundy (pp. 59-61), the latter person proving to be quite unrelated to the question in the end: Yolande died in 1280, i.e. twenty-five years before her husband, Robert de Dampierre, became Robert III of Flanders; the one shred of value the argument might have had is thrown away (p. 61) when we are told that Renaut could not have written the poem between 1268 and 1270. Why not? We know he was prior of Marizy-Sainte-Genevieve in 1296, but we do not know when he was born; young clerics (e.g. Gautier de Coinci) have been known to write poems on religious topics stuffed with miracles. It should, however, have been obvious to the editor, whose hesitations have nevertheless served to give us the material upon which to judge, that the linguistic evidence in favour of an early date is strongly supported by the known devotion to our saint of Eleanor, Countess of Vermandois, Dame de Valois from 1182-3 to 1214, and that the confusion about the mention of the Countess of Flanders in the prose version might well have arisen from the quarrel about the lands of Isabella of Vermandois, Countess of Flanders, between Philip of Alsace and Eleanor of Vermandois. None of the other women he mentions is known to have had any particular devotion for the saint in question.

This edition, despite its many shortcomings--far less serious in the presentation of the text than in the introductory matter and critical apparatus-is certainly one worthy of revision and re-presentation and we hope that its present editor will undertake the task. Failing that, the text itself can be used with confidence and the reader must exercise his critical faculty in dealing with the rest.

BRISTOL F. J. WARNE

Edition critique des versions en vers et en prose de la legende de l'empereur Constant. By JAMES COVENEY. (Publications de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Strasbourg, 126.) Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 1955. 197 pp.

Both in the linguistic and literary sections of his introduction Mr Coveney makes good use of the opportunities for comparison afforded by his two thirteenth-century Picard texts, each contained in a single manuscript.

His chapters on phonetics, morphology, syntax and sentence construction are based in the first instance on a separate study of each text. This is both clear (though the application to thlirteenth-century Picard of the remark (p. 25) on Chaucer's pronunciation of the word jay is not obvious) and detailed (though the omission of que conjunction in Et li dires qu'il ne laist mie. . .ou ne face... (poem, 11. 309-11) seems to have gone unnoticed). Then follows a comparative study in which the conclusions arrived at are stated with clarity and restraint. Particularly interesting are the differences revealed between verse and prose syntax.

Further comparisons in the etude litteraire lead to the plausible conclusion that both versions descend from a common source. The editor seems, however, less at home here than on the linguistic side. He appears unaware that the description of winter (poem, 11. 1 ff.) though much less common than the spring descriptions he mentions (pp. 86, 92, and again in the notes) is not without parallel in Old French literature (cf. K. Bartsch, Altfranzosische Romanzen und Pastourellen, bk. II, no. 23). He regards the knowledge that straw replaced reeds as floor-covering in winter (11. 7-8) and the mention of pen, ink, and sealed parchment (11. 399-402) as indicating respectively that the poet 'frequentait les chateaux' (p. 92) and was 'peut-etre un scribe de profession' (p. 98); but surely these are mere commonplaces of every- day life. On p. 96, comparing Fresne with the Constant poem, he substitutes

Genevieve and a consequent long discussion about the claims of a late thirteenth- century Renaut and about Yolande of Burgundy (pp. 59-61), the latter person proving to be quite unrelated to the question in the end: Yolande died in 1280, i.e. twenty-five years before her husband, Robert de Dampierre, became Robert III of Flanders; the one shred of value the argument might have had is thrown away (p. 61) when we are told that Renaut could not have written the poem between 1268 and 1270. Why not? We know he was prior of Marizy-Sainte-Genevieve in 1296, but we do not know when he was born; young clerics (e.g. Gautier de Coinci) have been known to write poems on religious topics stuffed with miracles. It should, however, have been obvious to the editor, whose hesitations have nevertheless served to give us the material upon which to judge, that the linguistic evidence in favour of an early date is strongly supported by the known devotion to our saint of Eleanor, Countess of Vermandois, Dame de Valois from 1182-3 to 1214, and that the confusion about the mention of the Countess of Flanders in the prose version might well have arisen from the quarrel about the lands of Isabella of Vermandois, Countess of Flanders, between Philip of Alsace and Eleanor of Vermandois. None of the other women he mentions is known to have had any particular devotion for the saint in question.

This edition, despite its many shortcomings--far less serious in the presentation of the text than in the introductory matter and critical apparatus-is certainly one worthy of revision and re-presentation and we hope that its present editor will undertake the task. Failing that, the text itself can be used with confidence and the reader must exercise his critical faculty in dealing with the rest.

BRISTOL F. J. WARNE

Edition critique des versions en vers et en prose de la legende de l'empereur Constant. By JAMES COVENEY. (Publications de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Strasbourg, 126.) Paris: Les Belles Lettres. 1955. 197 pp.

Both in the linguistic and literary sections of his introduction Mr Coveney makes good use of the opportunities for comparison afforded by his two thirteenth-century Picard texts, each contained in a single manuscript.

His chapters on phonetics, morphology, syntax and sentence construction are based in the first instance on a separate study of each text. This is both clear (though the application to thlirteenth-century Picard of the remark (p. 25) on Chaucer's pronunciation of the word jay is not obvious) and detailed (though the omission of que conjunction in Et li dires qu'il ne laist mie. . .ou ne face... (poem, 11. 309-11) seems to have gone unnoticed). Then follows a comparative study in which the conclusions arrived at are stated with clarity and restraint. Particularly interesting are the differences revealed between verse and prose syntax.

Further comparisons in the etude litteraire lead to the plausible conclusion that both versions descend from a common source. The editor seems, however, less at home here than on the linguistic side. He appears unaware that the description of winter (poem, 11. 1 ff.) though much less common than the spring descriptions he mentions (pp. 86, 92, and again in the notes) is not without parallel in Old French literature (cf. K. Bartsch, Altfranzosische Romanzen und Pastourellen, bk. II, no. 23). He regards the knowledge that straw replaced reeds as floor-covering in winter (11. 7-8) and the mention of pen, ink, and sealed parchment (11. 399-402) as indicating respectively that the poet 'frequentait les chateaux' (p. 92) and was 'peut-etre un scribe de profession' (p. 98); but surely these are mere commonplaces of every- day life. On p. 96, comparing Fresne with the Constant poem, he substitutes

Reviews Reviews 433 433

28 28 M.L.R. LT M.L.R. LT

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