Review by Choice Review
Béroul is known to medieval scholars as the author of a "vulgar" or "non-courtly" version of the Tristan legend. Béroul's is a more elemental or primitive telling, somewhat disjointed and lacking in a flow of cause and effect, and the characters are often poorly defined. Since the 1970s, Sargent-Baur (emer., Univ. of Pittsburgh) has been publishing authoritative studies of the present fraught Old French script. Echoing Dante, she likens the task she has undertaken to adventuring into a forest where the text, an "incomplete, lamentable, and lamentably unique copy" (as she writes in her preface), can only be glimpsed. Dual authorship of this classic story of unbridled passion complicates matters, but there is an iceberg even below that of philological challenges--challenges such as interpretation, grammatical usage, and lexical clarifications. The volume features a detailed introduction and a hundred-page diplomatic edition (the first ever), followed by normalized Old French text and nearly one hundred pages of textual notes (the equivalent of a truly close, word-by-word reading). This volume will provide endless delight to scholars. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Raymond J. Cormier, emeritus, Longwood University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
