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From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe Edited by E. Jane Burns and Peggy McCracken (review)

Saracen Brunamon and thereby wins his sword Cortain, his horse Broiefort, and, temporarily, his freedom. These events are recounted in just over three thousand decasyllabic lines that are materially separated from the rest of the poem, the Chevalerie Ogier proper, in all five French manuscripts of the work. The Chevalerie — an additional nine thousand or more lines — will eventually appear in a second volume from the same editor and publisher. Though previously edited in 1842 by Joseph Barrois and in 1963 by Mario Eusebi, the present edition far surpasses both in accuracy, thoroughness, and (now) accessibility. Like the preceding editors, Muriel Ott has chosen the single best manuscript (B): Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 938. Her edition conforms to the latest practices for editing Old French texts, while taking into account the peculiarities of the scribe’s slightly Italianized language. The Introduction (pp. 9–162) is notable not only for covering the philological basics (manuscript descriptions and relationships, editing conventions, language and versification, date and place of composition), but especially for providing what is the best literary study of the work to date. A detailed and well-organized bibliography (pp. 163–87) is followed by the edition proper, which takes up just over a hundred pages. An invaluable listing of variants permits comparisons across all five Enfances manuscripts. Nearly a hundred pages of Notes are used principally to justify editorial choices, but some provide useful commentary on historical problems, literary motifs and figures, vocabulary, Italianisms, and the interpretation of difficult passages. A remarkably comprehensive glossary and an index of proper names complete the edition. Ott rejects Barrois’s attribution of the poem to Raimbert de Paris, who is named only in two of the less reliable manuscripts (DP). She believes the epic was originally composed by an anonymous poet at the end of the twelfth century, probably in the north-east of France, although the text she uses was most likely written down in Italy in the thirteenth century. She suspects that the Enfances section was composed after the Chevalerie, as indeed is generally the case with enfances. It references other poems, notably Aspremont and Partonopeu de Blois, and is filled with motifs typical of the genre — the island duel, the amorous Saracen princess, the noble Saracen called to convert, miracles and the supernatural, dreams as forewarnings, Charlemagne’s pusillanimous son Charlot — although it frequently treats these in novel ways. Where previous editors and critics generally disparaged this work for its length, its use of stereotypical motifs, its ‘decadence’, and so forth, Ott rightly revels in the poem’s originality, its varied laisse structure, and its compelling story. I can only echo her own hope that this edition, which truly leaves nothing to wish for, ‘invit[era] au contraire le lecteur [. . .] à relire avec plaisir et intérêt les aventures de jeunesse d’Ogier le Danois’ (p. 162).