TY - JOUR
AU - Knox, Philip
AB - Recent decades have seen an energetic reassessment of the role of French language and culture in late medieval English literature, drawing new attention to the persistence and vitality of late forms of Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French and also to the ways in which French could connect English writers to the large geographical expanse in which this language functioned as a kind of literary lingua franca. Elizaveta Strakhov’s Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years’ War is an ambitious new contribution to this burgeoning field. Strakhov draws together a number of different argumentative strands. The central preoccupation of the book is the group of late medieval lyric forms known as the formes fixes: the ‘balades, roundels, virelays’ often evoked as a set by later medieval writers such as Chaucer. Building on work by Ardis Butterfield, Strakhov sees these mobile and iterable forms as key to helping scholars ‘recategorize objects of enquiry long siloed by scholars into distant literary historical strands or else locked into rigid configurations’ (13). This interest is connected to a larger question about the nature of translation, here expansively defined to encompass not just the transfer of texts from one language to another but also the borrowing of forms between languages. From this perspective, ‘form’ might refer to a specific prosodic pattern, like a ballade or rondeau, but it can also refer to other elements of a text, ‘fungible units of meaning’ (12) like repeated stock phrases, or even complex intertextual allusions. Drawing on Rita Copeland’s work on medieval translation, Strakhov argues that the lyric exchanges and the reuse of forms that she finds on both sides of the English Channel suggest an accretive rather than competitive mode of translation. Strakhov calls this less agonistic kind of translation (which Copeland had linked to St Jerome’s comments on translating the Bible) ‘reparative translation’. Strakhov sees this as promoting ‘structure, alliance, and solidarity within institutional configurations that had become disrupted by the Hundred Years’ War’ (16–17). After laying out these structuring preoccupations in the Introduction, Strakhov turns to a close examination of the formes fixes lyrics. This lucid and impressively compressed chapter sketches the emergence of the formes fixes, before turning to examine late medieval treatises on lyric composition, such as Eustache Deschamps’s well-known Art de dictier, as well as the fascinating and neglected treatises of the so-called ‘seconde rhétorique’. The chapter concludes with a virtuoso reading of the arrangement of elements in a famous French lyric manuscript, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Manuscript MS Codex 902 (olim French 15). This manuscript has long been known to scholars of Middle English because of James I. Wimsatt’s tentative hypothesis that the French lyrics annotated by a medieval reader with the letters ‘Ch’ might represent the kind of French-language juvenilia that Chaucer is often assumed to have written. With meticulous scholarship, Strakhov is able to show that the ‘Ch’ lyrics do indeed seem to represent a distinctive stratum within the manuscript, perhaps drawn from a different exemplar. Strakhov notes the careful patterning of elements that the compiler of this manuscript has created, alternating between different formal types. The larger interpretative argument here, that the University of Pennsylvania manuscript thus constitutes a kind of ‘metapoetic meditation on the history of the formes fixes’ development’ (45) is arresting and in many ways persuasive. Even for those who would hesitate to argue that the manuscript is making a statement of such coherence, the care and deliberation that went into its organization will be hard to deny in the wake of Strakhov’s detailed and attentive work. The second chapter turns more directly to the place of the Hundred Years’ War, thinking about how conflict is represented and perhaps overcome in lyric writing. The chapter begins by analysing three pastourelles—short narrative poems in the first person—which represent contemporary events. These include works by an anonymous poet from Picardie, as well Deschamps and Jean Froissart. The first two examples rail against the violence and destruction of the war, whereas the third, by Froissart, a French-speaking poet from the Low Countries in the service of the English crown, celebrates the arrival of Jean II of France into England as a hostage as a positive event. For Strakhov, Froissart’s ‘play with pastourelle form to emphasize eventual peace and prosperity constitutes this study’s most basic example of reparative translation work’ (62). The second part of the chapter turns to the sometimes vitriolic three-way cross-Channel lyric exchange between the poets Phillipe de Vitry, Jean De Le Mote, and Jean Campion, a fascinating moment of literary history to which Ardis Butterfield drew new attention. Strakhov adds to Butterfield’s analysis by drawing in a fourth co-ordinate, Petrarch, who corresponded with Philippe de Vitry, and who allows Strakhov to explore in thought-provoking terms the nature of classical allusion in these works, and so bringing her focus on lyric into contact with the emergent preoccupations of early humanism. The third chapter turns to another cross-Channel lyric transmission that has received renewed attention in the wake of Butterfield’s work: the ballade addressed to Chaucer by Eustache Deschamps in which the English poet is famously evoked as a ‘grant translateur’. Scholars have hesitated over whether to read this poem as straight-faced praise or back-handed compliment; Strakhov argues that Deschamps calls Chaucer ‘a “grant translateur” not to deride or dismiss him but to bring him into a Continental conversation about reparative translation and the Hundred Years’ War’ (102). Other lyric works by Deschamps are helpfully brought into the conversation, as are Ovidian meditations on exile. Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women is then used to broaden this discussion, with intriguing readings of its use of an inserted ballade, its classical reference, and the relation between its two versions. The fourth chapter draws these ideas towards two further poets who are read as representing a distinctively ‘Lancastrian’ position, writing after the accession of Henry IV: Thomas Hoccleve, and, interestingly, the much older poet John Gower. Gower’s French ballades are seen as presenting an implicit critique of Lancastrian ambitions on the Continent (with an observant detour via the Middle English translation of these lyrics by a writer known as Quixley), while Hoccleve’s often neglected lyric corpus is read as revealing the possibilities of a rich relationship with Continental literary activity. The final chapter turns to two fifteenth-century canonizers of Chaucer, the poet John Lydgate and the scribe John Shirley. Strakhov cleverly juxtaposes the fifteenth-century insistence on the monumental Englishness of Chaucer with the deepening connection to the Continent during a period of radical English expansion. Ranging widely across Lydgate’s works, examining both his shorter lyrics and his use of Italian sources via French translation in his longer texts, Strakhov shows the centrality of French literary activity for both Lydgate and Shirley, with both figures revealing that ‘England’s national literary arena is defined not by the homespun isolationism of a bounded island but by its openness to other languages and literatures, which will elevate it to posterity’ (214). Overall, this ambitious book makes some fascinating interventions, working from a complex and diverse set of texts. Late medieval lyric, especially in English, is a notoriously intractable corpus, and this study wrestles impressively with the basic unruliness of the materials under scrutiny. But what is most likely to provoke debate is the strongly optimistic reading of the potential of late medieval literature to transcend political division. Where other readers of ‘cross-Channel’ literature have seen (like Butterfield) involuted ambivalence, Strakhov sees openness and internationalist solidarity. Today we are living through a period of political fragmentation in which, unconsciously but also often consciously, the medieval European past is often turned to as a way of imagining an alternative present. Those who demur from Strakhov’s reading of literature’s reparative potential will still need to answer the question of what a darker or more variegated vision of the past has to say to our own agonistic moment. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Elizaveta Strakhov. Continental England: Form, Translation, and Chaucer in the Hundred Years’ War
JO - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgac046
DA - 2022-08-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/elizaveta-strakhov-continental-england-form-translation-and-chaucer-in-Mpz0gESHLI
SP - 786
EP - 788
VL - 73
IS - 311
DP - DeepDyve
ER -