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Richard Trachsler, Merlin l'enchanteur: élude sur le Merlin de Robert de Bonn (Paris: SEDES, 2000). 158 pp. ISBN 2-7181-933i-X. euro21.50.
This useful book, designed for Agrégation candidates, provides an admirable introduction to a text of great importance for the development of Arthurian cyclic Grail romance. Richard Trachsler bases his study on Micha's edition of a prose version (that of Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS £ fr. 747) of Robert de Boron's verse Merlin, of which only the first 5 04 lines have come down to us in the sole surviving manuscript of Robert de Boron's work in verse, where his Joseph is followed by the beginning of his Merlin. Trachsler draws attention to the complexities of the manuscript tradition; he points out that at the end of line 747 there is a note in which Robert de Boron announces a literary project that seems to look forward to the Post-Vulgate cycle, and suggests that any Merlin study has to take this into account. In part I he sets Robert's Merlin briefly within a wider context, not only that of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae...