REVUE : MEDIAEVISTIK 29, 2016

The present volume is the result of a colloquium on the ancient novel held at the University of Tours in 2013—the seventh in the series, this one featuring fifteen scholars, specialists in antiquity, the Middle Ages and continuing down to the nineteenth century. During the medieval and early modern eras, the ancient novel arose, it must be recalled, from various learned sources—whether from the Byzantine east or by way of Latin originals. Within this category fall as well the ancient Greek novels such as Chariton’s Callirhoe (mid-1st centu- ry), Achilles Tatius’s Leucippe and Clitophon (early-2nd century), Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe (2nd century), Xenophon of Ephe- sus’s Ephesian Tale (late-2nd century), and Heliodorus of Emesa’s Aethiopica (third century). Later Greek novels (specifically medieval) include the eleventh-century Di- genes Akrites and twelfth-century Drosilla and Charikles by Niketas Eugeniano, Rodan- the and Dosikles by Theodore Prodromos, and Hysmine and Hysminias by Eustathios Makrembolites. A large cache of these precious texts was rescued from a Budapest fire in 1526 and their value as surviving witnesses to imperial tastes is a testament to their importance today.
Leading off is the editor’s “Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages : the Thread of Transmission,” followed by “The Heritage of Ancient Romance in the Middle Ages : Some Conditions of Possibility,” authored by Jean-Jacques Vincensini, which introduces the subsection “Entre Antiquité et Moyen Age : le ‘fil’ de la transmission.” Linda Simonis then studies the Apocalypse of St. Paul, an apocryphal text from late antiquity, taken as an amplified gloss on 2 Corinthians 12, 2–4, with an emphasis on space-time concerns that will go on to fascinate Dante. The fourth-century Greek Acts of Pilate, which relates the trial and Passion of Christ and which was once attributed to Pontius Pilate (he is thus at once actor and author), provides Lydie Lansard an opportunity to examine the work’s evolution down to the sixteenth century (when it was placed on the Index). Erotic love themes in the twelfth-century Greek romances arising in the Byzantine realm and drawing on ancient sources are studied by Florence Meunier, who sees influences from Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Xenophon. It falls to Massimiliano Gaggero to analyze, in the longest essay of the fifteen printed (with a good deal of precision), the fate of the tragic love story, Pyramus and Thisbe. Evolution of the Ovidian tale, its adaptation in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, the complex manuscript tradition, moralizations and allegorizations — all come in for scrutiny. It is a shame Gaggero does not know of Frank Coulson’s fine work (among many others, e.g., “Ovid’s Transformation in Medieval France, c.1100-c.1350,” in Metamorphosis. The Changing Face of Ovid in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Keith and St. Rupp [Toronto 2007], 33–60).
The next sub-section is entitled “Le Temps des Traductions, du XIIe au XVIIe siècle.” Alain Bideau recounts the “adventure,” so to speak, of the finding of Veldeke’s Eneas- roman, an imitation of Virgil’s Aeneid, then goes on to consider the interesting differences between the Roman d’Eneas and Veldeke’s version, matters that Bideau, in the end, argues are of scholarly interest. As he rightly observes, the “originality” of a literary work had no currency in the twelfth century. Concern over how many self-righteous prudes and censors bowdlerized the Leucippe and Clitophon romance of Achilles Tatius (of second century C.E. Alexandria) preoccupies Simone Beta. As she notes, Latin and Italian translators, as well as British ones, all found ways to skirt the text’s so-called obscenities. But missing from her bibliography is the fundamental survey by G. Schmeling, The Novel in the Ancient World, Mnemosyne, Suppl. 159 (Leiden, 1996; rev. paperback ed., 2003), 387–416 on Achilles Tatius. Marie-Ange Calvet-Sebasti then takes matters quite beyond late antiquity to address the translation work by a minor poet of the French Renaissance, Remy Belleau. His silent incorporation of portions from Jacques Amyot’s French translation of Daphnis and Chloé (by Longus) into a harmonious composite, La Bergerie (1572), a work that certainly and greatly enriched the pastoral fashion, a genre initiated by the third-century BCE Theocritus of Syracuse. Corinne Jouanno focuses on three translations by the prolific polygraph Jean Baudoin (1590–1650) : Lucian, Aesop’s Life and Leucippe and Clitophon (the romance by Achilles Tatius). Restrained by contemporary notions of respectability and propriety, Baudoin also censored his own prolix yet sober translations, either by moralizing or erasing textual obscenities. Jouanno also provides a comparative chart of a few selections from five predecessors of Baudoin, along with the relevant Greek text.
The last segment, containing six essays, is labeled “L’héritage assume : de la fin de la Re- naissance à l’époque contemporaine.” Koen de Temmerman and Alexander Roose take up a popular romance from 1599, Du Vray et parfaict amour, a kaleidoscopic pastiche of a Greek novel ascribed to Martin Fumée (a pseudonym?). Pauline Ruberry-Blanc has a brief piece (four pages) on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, followed by Richard Hillman’s six-page survey of various Shakespeare comedies and tragi-comedies containing, it is argued, a motif from ancient romance of family reunion through resurrection. The next two contributions by Ingela Nilsson and Jérôme Bastick need not detain us as they deal with material beyond the scope of coverage by Mediaevistik. The volume closes with an appraisal by the editor of the figure of Simon Magus and his companion Helen (yes, that Helen), important, it is claimed, as background characters for Goethe’s Faust, with echoes ranging even down to Flaubert.
Overall, this is a useful and wide-ranging collection that deals with lesser known material. The volume will call attention to these fascinating works and, it is hoped, invite more scholarship on them in the future.