present collection of essays celebrates the efforts of the fiction-writers of the fifteenth century: their experiments in fiction which have often been, until recently, depreciated and undervalued4: the efforts of those who translated and transposed the romans and chansons de geste which, they say, they have found languishing illegibly in faded and mildewed manuscripts; the efforts of those who essayed new approaches to what they saw as out-dated fictions; the efforts of those who re-imagined modes of story; the efforts, more distantly, of those who preserved and popularised – or attempted to popularise – the last gasps of an older fictional world, those who made it their aim to bring that world into the cultured courts of the fifteenth century and even, surprisingly, into the Renaissance and into a rationalising eighteenth century. The core of the volume – the essays by Brown-Grant, Chase, Dixon, Grimbert, Krueger, and Taylor – consists of revised versions of papers given at the International Congress of the Courtly Literature Society in Lisbon in 2013; the essays by Colombo Timelli, Ferlampin-Acher and Lacy are invited contributions designed to broaden a field of enquiry which, in recent years, has moved from backwater to cutting edge.

All this, of course, runs very much counter to what is still accepted stereotype. Too many critics, and certainly too many literary manuals, still talk of late-medieval fictions as merely mediocre: repetitive, derivative, at best dutiful. As Michel Zink put it, sadly but rightly, as recently as 1988:

Personne ne lit plus les romans du xive et xve siècles. […] On soupçonne en eux une forme qui a perdu son sens et qui se répète en remaniements et en compilations interminables et dépourvus d’invention5.

Still less, of course, do they celebrate the assiduities of the prosateurs, and even less again the appeal of such oddities as the Middle English Chinon,

or the determinedly modernising Bibliothèque universelle des romans. We, on the other hand, aim here to add to the growing chorus of voices that is now permitting the re-evaluation of late-medieval French fictions, by covering a range of texts of different sorts, and drawing on a range of different analytical disciplines. Fifteenth-century France was, of course, a period of intense and competing literary and codicological activity: the period which saw an extraordinary final flowering of romance and epic; which saw the production of many of the most magnificent of vernacular manuscripts – but which also saw the first steps towards print, and towards what is now the novel. The papers offered here are, at the textual level, steps towards our understanding of the repertory of literary devices and prototypical editorial moves that shape the new experiments in fiction; at the socio-cultural level, on the other hand, they aim to improve our grasp of the role played by these particular artefacts in the social, ideological and literary systems.

The first of these papers, that of Christine Ferlampin-Acher on Artus de Bretagne, is a textbook demonstration precisely of the value of exploring such devices in neglected fictions. Artus de Bretagne is, admittedly, a fourteenth – rather than a fifteenth-century artefact, but it enjoyed a quite remarkable popularity at the end of the Middle Ages, with twelve manuscripts and no fewer than fourteen editions before the end of the sixteenth century. There is still no full-scale critical edition and only a handful of studies6. In a move characteristic of many of the papers in this volume, Ferlampin-Acher focuses on something easily overlooked, gesture: the gestures of affection in particular which seem, for the anonymous author, to embody paradigms of cultural difference and to betray presuppositions about social attitudes and social participation. An ingenious prosateur, here, has integrated a particular motif into a new receiving culture, and operated, it seems, a cultural filter that accommodates an older romance for that target culture’s different presuppositions about social mores, attitudes and relationships.

As, of course, does Antoine de La Sale with his Jehan de Saintré – which, by contrast, has always attracted considerable scholarly attention,

in part as being perhaps the first modern novel7. Jane Taylor’s reading of Saintré is, in a sense, political: she argues that, in part, La Sale is creating meaning quite specific to one particular collective reading consciousness, that of a Burgundian court dismayed by, and preoccupied with, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the ferment of diplomatic and military activity which planned, though ultimately did not execute, crusading responses. Saintré’s resounding, if unlikely, victory of Christians over Sarrazins can, she suggests, be explained in terms which later centuries were to understand as “counter-factual”: that is, it recasts the outcomes of authentic history in ways that recreate a historical past to intrigue, or in this case to flatter, the readers of the late fifteenth century. In this connection, it is interesting to look at the recasting of fiction in ways which show traces of press and market and readers, as Roberta Krueger demonstrates via the Comte de Tressan’s rewriting of Saintré for the tastes evinced by the Bibliothèque universelle des romans. Tressan prunes La Sale’s romance of much of its chivalric content: gone also, above all, are the didactic passages which served perhaps, for La Sale, as justifications for fiction8. Tressan’s focus is, almost exclusively, the love-affair between Saintré and Madame des Belles Cousines, and the tone he uses is faintly but unmistakably salacious. He has, as it were, and as Krueger shows, colonised his source-text, in ways that tell us more, in the end, about the receptor culture’s preoccupations than about the fifteenth-century romance itself.

Translation and ré-écriture have, of course, always been about the power relation between source culture and target culture: the adaptor or translator has always as his first preoccupation to appropriate and thus refract – sometimes to rewrite – a source text in order to ensure that it can remain alive and functioning in a new cultural context9.

And one of the great benefits of exploring a major experiment in fiction, the proliferating mises en prose of the fifteenth century, is that it provides an embodiment of the experience of reading, a record of one era’s encounter with another10. Three papers, here, bring out what we earlier called the prototypical editorial moves of the prosateurs of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Joan Tasker Grimbert and Carol Chase11 address two unusually celebrated cases of mise en prose: respectively, the so-called Burgundian Erec and Cligés: celebrated because available to scholars from as early as the last years of the nineteenth century, and therefore much more widely analysed than is the case with other mises en prose12. Both scholars see the translations as particularly clear testimony to the complex, dialectical relationship between the prosateur(s), the source text(s), and the reading public. As is usual with mises en prose but perhaps here with particular acuity, the prosateur’s textual management, his intrusions and deletions, suggest significant ideological preferences designed, no doubt, for its intended Burgundian court audience13: a marked enthusiasm for the tournament which seemingly outweighs his interest in the love intrigues of the principal characters. Interestingly, however, his preference is for the tournament à l’ancienne – the dramatic mêlée rather than the single combat – but shorn, carefully, of less courtly features such as the taking of prisoners, the demanding of ransoms or the appropriation of horses and armour. His tournaments, as Grimbert and Chase argue,

are certainly nostalgic recreations of a chivalric and heroic past – but they also underline a continuity with that past by figuring as pageants calqued on the highly political tourneys designed by Philip the Good of Burgundy, for instance, as parades of power or tools of persuasion. The prosateurs, it seems, are concerned to extend the expressive relevance of their source texts – and although the scanty manuscript witness to the two mises en prose would suggest that this experiment in the fashioning of literary taste was unsuccessful14, the two romances show that their author was conscious of the Burgundian chivalric revival, and eager to exploit it by rebalancing his sources15. How far was this a conscious manœuvre? The prosateur of Cligés intervenes in his translation in terms which suggest that, in his case at least, this was a considered, thoughtful process – and interestingly, Pierre Durand, the prosateur of Guillaume de Palerne (c. 1527), who might seem rather more conservative in his manipulation of the source, is, as Maria Colombo Timelli shows, consciously interventionist, although in his case on moral grounds: is Durand perhaps intrigued by an ethics that, to his Renaissance eye, will seem dismayingly crude and unsophisticated? Whatever the case, all three of these mises en prose re-emphasise how imperative it is to take account of the particularities of each as a translating, and reformulating, project: the new interest in mises en prose, the new editions, the new tools at the disposal of critics, allow us, as in this volume, to see how the belief systems and values of the writer, and especially those he perceives to be the preference of his audience, inflect and affect translation and modernisation strategies16.

Finding favour with the dukes of Burgundy and the courts of their circle must, however, have meant taking account of a richly various range of practices of production – including, of course, illustration, itself

an aspect of “translation”, but also of “reading”, the topic of Rosalind Brown-Grant’s and Rebecca Dixon’s papers17. Both scholars address one of the more appealing artists working in Burgundian circles: the so-called Wavrin Master, known for his rapid, expressive, cartoon-like sketches done in pen and watercolour, and which provide dense illustrative programmes for a string of manuscripts. To say “cartoon-like” has, in the past, suggested an artist parodying the absurdities of plot in the fictions he illustrates – but here, Brown-Grant shows that the artist operates a far more responsible, explicative, complex reading. The Wavrin Master, she argues, is as experimental, as innovative, as are the romances he illustrates: Olivier de Castille, Florimont, the Comte d’Artois, the Histoire des Seigneurs de Gavre. He mediates between text and reader and acts as conscientious explicator, adapts his miniatures to the precise delineaments of the narrative, comic certainly, but also, when required, serious, and when required playing a serious role in the explication and articulation of the romances. Dixon, on the other hand, addresses a romance – also Burgundian – so neglected as to be virtually unknown: the Roman de Buscalus, a pseudo-historical account of the history of Tournai18. Dixon shows that Buscalus is perhaps, of all the romances dealt with in this volume, the most startlingly experimental – “a new genre […] the exoticized foundation myth”. But this romance too, incidentally, in its only near-complete manuscript, was illustrated by the Wavrin Master – and Dixon argues that just as this artist, with a string of other romances, was receptive to tone and narrative function, so here, with Buscalus, he is insistently documentary, thus responding, creatively, to the pseudo-historical, but also insistently inventive and ludic, and reacting, just as creatively, to the ferment of exotic adventures that characterise this interesting curiosity of a late-medieval romance. Brown-Grant and Dixon, in other words, demonstrate that in Burgundian circles, constructing meaning and assigning value are

participatory activities, in which manuscripts are a hybrid amalgam of text and imagery, with decorative programmes that actualise the imaginative, affective and emotional potential of the new romances19 – mises en prose, pseudo-histories – with which the writers are experimenting.

And so to an oddity, our coda: Christopher Middleton’s anonymous, and much unread, Chinon of England. Norris Lacy is politely deprecatory – although in terms which will surely make readers distinctly curious to read more … Chinon, a product of Tudor England (1597), is a farrago of riotous adventure, replete with all the commonplaces of romance; it is also, distantly, an Arthurian romance, distantly because it pays no more than lip-service to its predecessors, with little more than a few familiar names. But does not Chinon too emerge from an era of English narrative experiment, the era of the tangentially Arthurian Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), the era of Anthony Munday’s translations of the even more remotely Arthurian, even more teeming Amadis (of which the first book was published in 1596)? Romance, in England as in France, was by this time pervasive and persistent, inventively produced, widely distributed, responsive to the desires of readers: even if Chinon is a cultural leftover, even if its pullulating adventures defy all coherence, it surely remains evidence of an effort to meet and satisfy those readers’ cultural tastes.

Critics in France and England have long discussed the continuity between romance and novel: in older histories, however, romance is often dismissed as marginal, “fiction” and “literature” and “the novel” having been invented, curiously, only in the sixteenth century. Those older literary histories, at least in France, skip the fictions of the fifteenth century, with the grudging exception of Jehan de Saintré and perhaps the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. This present collection of essays addresses precisely the romances they skip, which were often popular in manuscript and which dominate the first century or so of fiction in print. As the romanciers, the prosateurs, the illustrators of the fifteenth century and later negotiate the cultural differences embodied by language, as they integrate the alterities of the source texts into their receiving culture,

as they break down the barriers of textuality and contextuality, they create, to borrow an expression from Samuel Daniel welcoming Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays, an “intertraffic of the mind”20: a series of experiments in fiction, sometimes successful, sometimes abortive, but which bear witness to a rich encounter with the other which transcends time, and geography.

Jane H. M. Taylor

Durham University