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The Loherain Cycle: A Project Completed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2016

Jean Misrahi*
Affiliation:
Fordham University

Extract

It is extremely gratifying to note the completion of the project first organized at Columbia University in 1931 for the purpose of publishing the then almost completely unavailable Loherain cycle of chansons de geste. Only the Hervis de Mez, edited by Edmund Stengel in 1903, could be consulted by scholars without having recourse to the very numerous manuscripts scattered through the libraries of Europe. The first part of the oldest and central portion of the cycle, the Garin le Loherain, could be read in the antequated edition of Paulin Paris (Paris 1833-1835), supplemented by the Mort de Garin le Loherain, edited by Edéléstand du Meril (Paris 1846). The second oldest chanson, Gerbert de Mez, and the last of the cycle, Ansays de Mez, were still unpublished except for a few fragments. Since then, however, Professor Josephine Vallerie, a member of the Loherain Seminar at Columbia, which was under the direction of Professor Pauline Taylor, has published an excellent edition of Garin le Loheren (according to the spelling of her base manuscript) in 1947. The last branch of the cycle had already been published in two different redactions by other members of the Seminar: Yon, or La vengeance Fromondin, edited by Simon R. Mitchneck (New York 1935), and the more satisfactory edition of the longer redaction under the title of Ansays de Mez, by Herman J. Green (Paris 1939). The one remaining unpublished branch of the central and oldest part of the cycle, Gerbert de Mez, which follows immediately upon Garin le Loheren, has now finally been made available in a very careful edition by Professor Taylor, published at Namur in 1952 by the Secrétariat des Publications of the Facultés Universitaires of that city. This terminal publication stemming from the work of the Columbia University Seminar, which included also several interesting studies of various aspects of the cycle, now makes the entire geste des Loherains available to students of the French epic.

Type
Miscellany
Copyright
Copyright © The Fordham University Press 

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