Floridoro: A Chivalric Romance

Renaissance Quarterly, Fall, 2007 by Nathalie Hester

Perhaps the only overstatement in the volume concerns the availability of Zayde in French today. Although Paige writes that the text is "relatively difficult to procure" (22), the Garnier edition of Lafayette's prose fiction, which he mentions, is an economical paperback edition usually found on the shelves of well-stocked French bookstores. This is not the case of Floridoro or Scanderbeide, which, like many of the texts in the Other Voice series, either have no modern edition in the original language or else have editions that are out of print or not readily obtainable in bookstores.

Still, the question of availability is central when considering these three latest publications of the Other Voice series, which are significant, indeed essential, scholarly contributions to the understanding of early modern European literature and culture. The quality, breadth, depth, and accessibility of these volumes may well result in these works having a wider audience in the Anglo-American university context than in their countries and languages of origin.

NATHALIE HESTER

University of Oregon