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Jourdain de Blaye en alexandrins, ed. Takeshi Matsumura, Textes litteraires francias 520 (Geneva: Droz, 1999). 2 vols. 1163 pp. ISBN 2-600-00380-0 and 2-600-00381-9. F. Fr. 100.00
This is a welcome first critical edition of a text which is important not only for its links with Ami et Amile and the list of the gestes in its opening lines, but also as a good example of late epic, with its multiple peripeteia, inter-familial conflicts, unjust king, and love interest. There is only one extant manuscript of the text, dated 1455, but this is complemented by a modern copy of a manuscript burnt in 1940 and of which there also exist several citations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century works, and four fragments, all at the...