In 1414, at the age of nineteen or twenty, Charles d'Orleans made evident his love for both poetry and aristocratic display: he paid the princely sum of "'276 liv. 7 s. 6 den. tour.' for 960 pearls to be used to embroider on the sleeves of a robe the words and music of his chanson 'Madame je suis plus joyeulx'" (Arn, p. 21, n. 52). The following year he was captured at [the battle of] Agincourt and spent the next twenty-five years of his life in captivity in England, where he turned himself into one of the most important fifteenth-century writers of English poetry. His English work--which survives in British Library MS Harley 682--recounts, mixing lyric and narrative, his love for a lady, her death, his mourning and subsequent withdrawal from [the God of] Love's service to the Castle of No Care, his unexpected meeting with Venus by the seashore, and his return to serving Fortune and the second lady. The work is, as Mary-Jo Arn says, "in a form well known in the late Middle Ages, a pseudo-autobiography involving the love life of a somewhat foolish narrator named for the poet . . . , who is largely unsuccessful and desperately unhappy with the life that his service to the God of Love and Venus (and by definition Fortune) brings him" (p. 3). This form is better known in the French tradition than the English: it describes much of the large progeny of the Roman de la Rose in the fourteenth century. Indeed, there is no comparable assemblage of lyric poetry elsewhere in Middle English; and perhaps the most intriguing questions about Charles's English poetry concern its place at the intersection of the French tradition with Chaucerian conventions and language (themselves indebted to French poetry) and with the idiosyncrasies of Middle English diction and prosody.
Mary-Jo Arn's exceptionally comprehensive and useful edition will help medievalists continue to address these questions. It will make the English poetry of Charles d'Orleans accessible to a wide audience, comprising, as the editor hopes, Chaucerians, Middle English scholars, Old French scholars, historians, and others (p. xi). It entirely supersedes the Early English Text Society edition of these poems by Robert Steele and Mabel Day (O.S. 215 and 220, repr. London, 1970) by offering all of the things the earlier edition did not attempt to have within its purview: a lengthy introduction on biographical, critical, linguistic, and codicological matters; editorial punctuation of the poems themselves; explanatory notes; glossary; and an up-to-date bibliography. This is a book that many will want to own; handsomely produced and sturdily bound, it is well worth its price.
John M. Fyler, Tufts University