Between Manuscript and Print: Literary Reception in Late Medieval France. The Case of the Songe de la Pucelle

Abstract Based on original archival and codicological research, this paper investigatesthe transformations and negotiations between manuscript and printedversions of fifteenth-century poetry through the specific example of one surprisinglycomplex debate poem, Le Songe de la Pucelle (The Dream of the Virgin). Ourdebate relates the choice that a female narrator must make between the respectiveappeals of two personifications, Love and Shame, who appear to her in a dreamvision.The manuscript tradition invariably collects the poem with other fifteenthcenturydebates and moral texts, while the early printed copies tended to haveexperienced a prior separate circulation and often remain as monotextual pamphlets.Manuscript and printed copies of the same poem seem, then, to target differentaudiences. My paper investigates this curious divergence in the transmission patternof the manuscript and printed versions of the Songe and seeks possible answers inthe very different sets of images accompanying the text in manuscript and printedversions.29 Halama