Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 29 July-4 August 2004

Medium Aevum, Fall-Winter, 2007

Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected Papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 29 July-4 August 2004, ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006 xiv 788 pp. ISBN 1-84384-079-0.

60.00 [pounds sterling]/$105.00. This is an astonishingly rich volume, published with impressive speed and efficiency by the organizers of what sounds like a thought-provoking conference. The four (excellent) plenary papers set the tone: Stephen Jaeger's nicely paradoxical take on the educational (but also dangerous) role of romance; Christopher Page's interesting meditation on what 'courtly music' might be; Richard and Mary Rouse's wonderfully detailed, wonderfully erudite contribution which forms not one but two papers, the first on the crusading context of the highly popular Athis et Prophillas, the second on a manuscript 'anthology' put together for Charles IV of France, and which, when its contents are compared and collated, becomes a 'crusading collection'. 'Set the tone' because each of these leads into papers developing the same theme. The educative role of courtly literature is discussed in relation, for instance, to the 'anti-romances' of Andrea da Barberino, to Castiglione's Courtier, to the Chastoiement d'un pere a son fils, to Wolfram's Titurel, to Jean Bodel, to Philip the Good's devotional manuscripts, and to Wace's Round Table. Music, sadly, is rather thinner on the ground: there is only an interesting paper on music performance in Middle High German courtly literature. The most fruitful, and the most coherent, of the themes is that devoted to the manuscript context of courtly literature: readings or rereadings of Wace's Brut in BL, Egerton MS 3028, Alain Chartier in Sion Supersaxo 97bis, Marie de France in Harley 978, of medieval German song collections, of uncourtly texts in Chantilly, MS Conde 475. This seems to have been a peculiarly focused conference; its proceedings are critically sophisticated, and thought-provoking.