Between Manuscript and Print: Literary Reception in Late Medieval France

Abstract

Based on original archival and codicological research, this paper investigates the transformations and negotiations between manuscript and printed versions of fifteenth-century poetry through the specific example of one surprisingly complex debate poem, Le Songe de la Pucelle (The Dream of the Virgin). Our debate relates the choice that a female narrator must make between the respective appeals of two personifications, Love and Shame, who appear to her in a dream-vision. The manuscript tradition invariably collects the poem with other fifteenth-century debates and moral texts, while the early printed copies tended to have experienced a prior separate circulation and often remain as monotextual pamphlets. Manuscript and printed copies of the same poem seem, then, to target different audiences. My paper investigates this curious divergence in the transmission pattern of the manuscript and printed versions of the Songe and seeks possible answers in the very different sets of images accompanying the text in manuscript and printed versions.