Timmel Mihm Madelyn (ed.). The Songe d'enfer of Raoul de Houdenc: An edition based on all the extant manuscripts

Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. — 192 p. — (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 190).A versatile poet, Raoul de Houdenc has left us a variety of works in several styles and seems to have enjoyed a wide reputation in the Middle Ages. His Songe d'Enfer, a satirical allegory and parody of a pious visit to Hell, marks several innovations in medieval vernacular literature. As Hans Robert Jauss and Uda Ebel have noted, the Songe d'Enfer is the first known otherworld voyage in which the stages of the journey are represented by personified vices; it is the first fictional narrative, in the first person, to be presented as the report of a dream. In using allegory for non-religious ends — the customary moralizing explanation of the allegory is absent — it marks a new step in the progressive secularization of religious allegory. Its humorous feast of the devils is imitated in several later medieval works. This short but fascinating poem deserves a reliable edition, prepared according to modern principles of textual editing, which can serve as a basis for further study of its literary merits and its position in the tradition of medieval vision and dream literature. This volume presents the first such edition, for it is the first to be based upon all nine extant manuscripts. Previous editions by Achille Jubinal (Paris, 1837), by Auguste Scheler (Louvain, 1879), and by Phileas Lebesgue (Paris, 1908) depend upon only two manuscripts: Paris, Β. Ν.,fonds frangais 837 and fonds frangais 1593. Of these three previous editions, only Scheler's contains any critical apparatus, and it is not well prepared: the variants are inaccurate and the textual notes sketchy; numerous small changes in the text are not recorded in the variants or notes; the volume is marred by printer's errors. In 1897 and 1898 Mathias Friedwagner promised a critical edition of the Songe d'Enfer as Volume III of Raoul de Houdenc's Sämtliche Werke, but that edition did not appear.