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11178 results in Anglo Saxon and medieval literature

Page 357 of 559

London Literature, 1300–1380
  • Ralph Hanna
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005
  • English literary culture in the fourteenth century was vibrant and expanding. Its focus, however, was still strongly local, not national. This study examines in detail the literary production from the capital before, during, and after the time of the Black Death. In this major contribution to the field, Ralph Hanna charts the development and the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing. He uncovers the interactions between texts and authors across a range of languages and genres: not just Middle English, but Anglo-Norman and Latin; not just romance, but also law, history, and biblical commentary. Hanna emphasises the uneasy boundaries legal thought and discourse shared with historical and 'romance' thinking, and shows how the technique of romance, Latin writing associated with administrative culture, and biblical interests underwrote the great pre-Chaucerian London poem, William Langland's Piers Plowman.

  • 5 - Anglo-Norman's imagined end

  • Ralph Hanna, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    London Literature, 1300–1380
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005, pp 222-242

  • Summary

    The period from the late 1360s, that context in which the Pepys MS was copied, already saw many sweeping cultural changes, foretastes of the future. Among these, one might reckon the death of Anglo-Norman. Of course, Anglo-Norman's historical end lies well outside the period; as a well-known, mostly south-eastern lingua franca, it survived the Middle Ages, eventually, as ‘Law French’ to be euthanised by statute in 1731. But its last two poets are John Gower and, the focus of this chapter,Sir John Chandos's Herald. The latter describes the period c. 1370–85 as one of crisis and disorder, both as event within his strongly retrospective narrative and as the social context into which he presents his text. His discussion, beyond pointing to the similar sense of crisis that turned a London hanger-on,William Rokayle, intoWilliam Langland, the poet of Piers Plowman, exemplifies Anglo-Norman's imagination of its own (preordained, I'm afraid) end as a literary culture.

    The Chandos Herald (who signs the last line of his work) is not precisely an English figure at all. As his great editor, Mildred K. Pope, demonstrated, he came from Hainault, the same region near Valenciennes as his colleague, perhaps friend, Jean Froissart. He may be identical with the herald Haneray (Henri?), brought by the Black Prince's companion Sir John Chandos from ‘outremer’; Haneray received a payment from Sir JohnWing. eld, the Black Prince's administrator, in 1355.

  • 2 - The ‘Old’ Law

  • Ralph Hanna, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    London Literature, 1300–1380
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005, pp 44-103

  • Summary

    Once, in an age more philologically concerned, ‘The Proclamation of 1258’ had a venerated, because originary, status. The text, a little inaccurately identified as the oldest surviving piece of London Middle English, remains of philological importance, and this the only guise under which it is published. But, whether originary or no, the proclamation repays scrutiny because of its characteristics as an early London document.

    First of all, it is a legal document, not a literary text. In it, ‘Henri, þurჳ godes fultume king on Englene loande’, reassures a community of its rights, and in two languages, only one truly a vernacular, English and Anglo-Norman; Henry III promulgated this text, under duress, to hold off his rebellious barons (the ‘rædesmen’ whose power to legislate, exclusive of regal veto, the text acknowledges) after the Parliament of Oxford. As will appear, this is an important legal nexus. Two copies of the text survive: that normally printed, entered on the Patent Roll in the Public Record Office, in the form of an address to the sheriff of Huntingdonshire; and one surviving promulgated writ (English only), that sent to the sheriff of Oxford and to be preserved in the county muniments – as the document commands ‘to halden amanges ჳew ine hord’ (lines 20–2, 34–5).

    Secondly, befitting a legal text, the proclamation, in both renditions, is written in legal script. This is a hand associated with the production of documents, rather than that customary for copying books in the thirteenth century, the formal littera gothica textualis.

  • 4 - Pepys 2498: Anglo-Norman audiences and London biblical texts

  • Ralph Hanna, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    London Literature, 1300–1380
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005, pp 148-221

  • Summary

    The depiction of Beves as a divinely ‘helped whelp’ speaks to one of the great paradoxes of romance. Northrop Frye encapsulates it in his provocative description of the form as involving ‘fables of identity’. The poems build their exemplarism, the integrated individual capable of restoration to, and consequent restoration of, his paternal locale, through a process of successive and shifting representations. But not only do these shift; no one of the representations can itself be other than fragmented and plural (the hero's identity/his represented identity). Thus, the pluralistic narrative métier of the genre always plays against its larger foundational claims to singularity or identity, and, more importantly, threatens the social work the genre, as secular ‘master-narrative’, always claims it is performing. The first twenty lines of Guy of Warwick, for example, put the paradox forthrightly:

    Fayre aduenturis hadden they,

    For euere they louyd sothfastenesse,

    Faith with trewthe and stedfastnesse.

    Therfore schulde man with gladde chere

    Lerne goodnesse, vndirstonde and here.

    Who my[ch]e it hereth and vndirstondeth it

    By resoun, he shulde bee wyse of witte,

    And Y it holde a fayre mastrye

    To occupye wisedome and leue folye.

    (Caius MS 12–20)

    Like the similar opening of the later Wars of Alexander, Guy is presented as offering exemplaristic historical knowing, available in verse. Reading or hearing the poem is a wise occupation, and one that leads to appropriate moral knowledge, a sobriety in touch with the largest abstract verities.

  • 3 - Reading romance in London: The Auchinleck Manuscript and Laud misc. 622

  • Ralph Hanna, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    London Literature, 1300–1380
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005, pp 104-147

  • Summary

    Every scholar who has seriously examined the Auchinleck MS has agreed that it is composed of twelve booklets (for these, see facsimile ix). Although certainly preserved in an intended order, fixed by the consecutively numbered texts, and imposed by scribe 1 at the end of the work, these pieces are almost certainly not preserved in anything like the order of their production (see pp. 75–9). That being said, it is possible to see in the book a somewhat more coherent structure, imposed by scribe 1, than merely the constituent production pieces.

    Rather broadly, the book can be divided into three sections (cf. Turville-Petre 1996, 112–13, within an exciting extended discussion 108–41). At the head, Booklet 1 and the first text of Booklet 2 (item 10, the ‘Speculum Gy de Warwick’) stand apart. These are certainly separate from what follows (indeed, within the manuscript, the ‘Speculum’ is marked off by a change of scribal hand), and more unremittingly religious in emphasis than anything that will ensue. Moreover, the works are, in the context of this manuscript, unusually brief, and they share a general origin as being imports, not local London work. Analogues to these poems appear almost exclusively in a series of important thirteenth and early fourteenth-century miscellanies from the Worcester–Hereford area: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86; Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.39 (323); and British Library, MS Harley 2253, or their later Western derivatives (e.g. the Vernon MS).

  • 1 - English vernacular culture in London before 1380: the evidence

  • Ralph Hanna, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    London Literature, 1300–1380
    Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005, pp 1-43

  • Summary

    In 1978, Ian Doyle and Malcolm Parkes inaugurated a new era of manuscript study. In their discussion of an early Confessio Amantis manuscript, Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2, they identified five important scribes sharing out the production, in London just after 1400. In the course of the study, Doyle and Parkes located the inception of a London book-trade that specialises in works of Chaucer and Gower and that is vitally important to understanding the development of English Literature as we know it. Their work has stimulated numerous daughter studies and squarely fixed critical attention on the development, in London, of a canon of English Authors.

    Another comment by one of these scholars, now a few years later, fills in a further aspect of these seminal findings. Doyle, discussing ‘English books in and out of court’ (1983, 164–5), points out how few of them can be associated with the metropolis before 1400. And he comments upon the likelihood that before that date, the vernacular book-trade was in the main ‘provincial’ in nature. Although he notices the existence (and Chaucer's possible use) of ‘The Auchinleck MS’ (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates' 19.2.1), it appears in his account as a fairly isolated accident of London work.

    But this was simply a moment of inattention on Doyle's part. He certainly knew, in his 1953 dissertation, more than anyone before or since about pre-1400 London books (and what will follow is pervasively indebted to his work).

  • 3 - La Vie de saint Nicolas

  • from Part I - Wace: hagiographer
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 51-78

  • Summary

    Whether or not the composition of the Vie de saint Nicolas postdates the Conception Nostre Dame, this poem occupies an interesting intermediate position between the relatively straightforward task of adapting for a French-speaking audience the Vie de sainte Marguerite, from two, quite similar Latin versions, and the textual labyrinth offered by the sources relating to the life of the Virgin. Though the subject matter was less elevated than for the Conception, for his Vie de saint Nicolas Wace was working with even more popular material than that of La Vie de sainte Marguerite. Saint Nicholas was one of the most loved saints of the medieval Christian world; his cult was well-established in Western Europe from the eleventh century, and his miracles were celebrated in Latin Lives and hymns, as well as plays. His fame endures to this day in the popular figure of Santa Claus.

    Nicholas is thought to have lived at some time in the fourth century AD. The only son of wealthy parents, so the legend tells us, he was noted from his youth for his piety and charity. At the death of his parents, he sells all his belongings and gives the money to the poor. Elected Bishop of Myra, he leads an exemplary life distinguished by numerous miracles; his legend thus credits him, amongst other marvels, with freeing three counts unjustly condemned to death by the emperor Constantine; saving some sailors threatening with shipwreck by calming a storm; averting famine from his country; and bringing back to life students murdered by an innkeeper for their money. He is said to have died on 6 December 343. As patron saint of sailors, merchants and children, Saint Nicholas met with an early popularity in Normandy, thanks to the commercial links with the Norman kingdom of Sicily. Two churches were dedicated to him in Caen alone, in the 1080s. The cult was further reinforced in 1087, when Norman merchants took the relics of the saint from his tomb in Myra and transferred them to Bari, in southern Italy, which swiftly became an important pilgrimage centre. Wace's Life of Nicholas, like his Life of Margaret (or indeed the Conception), was thus composed in the first stages of a period of expansion in the cult of the saint; Nicolas saw his popularity spread from England, Italy and Normandy throughout twelfth-century France and western Germany.

  • 8 - William II of Normandy – the Conqueror

  • from Part III - Le Roman de Rou
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 209-252

  • Summary

    The rule of William II of Normandy takes up more than half of the Troisième Partie, covering some 6100 octosyllabic lines out of a total of 11440; in terms of length, this is therefore the most important episode in the work. The rule of his son and successor Duke Robert Curthose, at under 1800 lines in length, appears by comparison as a rather half-hearted postscript, thus echoing (whether by design or by accident) the impact of the Arthurian section and its aftermath in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and in Wace's own Roman de Brut. However, William II of Normandy fails to attain the mythical stature of an Arthur, or even that of the more striking of his own forebears. The main reason for this lies in the fact that the material was too recent. From this point onwards, Wace has to tread carefully over what must have been a political minefield. He appears to have been under pressure from local families to include them in high-profile events such as the Battle of Hastings and omit them from accounts of unsuccessful rebellion; hence the presence of certain names in the Gesta Normannorum Ducum or other key sources unmentioned in Wace's narrative, and vice-versa. His favoured ‘ne sai’, which in the Roman de Brut and much of the preceding part of the Rou had been used as a device to set in greater relief the significance of what was being said through the very triviality of the information claimed not to be known, is increasingly used as a hedging device to avoid being drawn into taking sides. Of the hostility opposing Waukelin of Ferrières and Hugh of Montfort, at the beginning of the rule of young William, Wace coyly remarks: ‘ne sai ki out dreit ne ki tort’, ‘I do not know who was in the right and who was in the wrong’ (3256); and more forcibly, in the account of the battle of Val-ès-Dunes (4131–5):

    Ne vos voil dire, ne ne sai

    ne jeo escrit trové ne l'ai,

    ne jeo n'i fui, ne jeo nel vi,

    li quel d'els melz se combati,

    mais jeo sai que li reis venqui.

  • 6 - King Arthur and the passage of dominion

  • from Part II - Le Roman de Brut
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 125-150

  • Summary

    The reign of Arthur is the section of Wace's work where the poet takes the greatest liberties with his sources. Most notably, it is the episode where the historical stance appears to be at its weakest, with the intrusion of material that is neither didactic nor religious in origin. It is also the fullest account of any of the Celtic kings of Britain, covering two Books (Books IX and X) or 37 chapters (out of a total of 207) in the Latin sources. Wace's account of Arthur's reign is not a homogeneous, uniform whole. It develops in three stages, starting with the young king's struggle to establish his authority over Britain, during which he frees the land from the Saxon threat; continuing with his glorious mature years, which see him conquer Norway and France; and ending with the reappearance of the old enemy, Rome, and Modred's treason.

    Young Arthur

    Wace takes relatively little interest in the early, defensive exploits of Arthur, the high point of the Arthurian section being the foundation of the Round Table, the conquest of France and the glories of the Whitsun court at Caerleon (at which the Roman ultimatum is delivered). The account of the youthful exploits of the once and future king follows the Variant text quite closely, with only very minor, predictable additions such as the fact that the Saxon Baldulf, who has disguised himself as a jongleur to gain access to his brother through enemy lines, had been taught to sing and play the harp (9103–4). Despite the occasional rhetorical passage (for example, descriptions of Saxon débâcle, 9179–82 and 9395–406), the trend is towards compression and narrative economy. This is effected by the omission of information, albeit on a limited scale, and through the subtle reshaping of certain episodes.

    The focus is firmly on Arthur from the outset. The scene where Arthur arms himself before the battle of Bath remains close to the account of the First Variant version, but Wace adds iron foot-protection to the young king's equipment, and mentions that his jewel-encrusted helmet had belonged to Uther (9283–8), thus reinforcing both the scene's realism and its dynastic significance.

  • Part II - Le Roman de Brut

  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 81-84

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION

    In 1155, Wace (by then well into his forties or early fifties) completed what is generally considered among literary scholars to be his chef d'oeuvre: the long narrative poem now known under the title of Roman de Brut. Its main claim to fame for most is that it is the first vernacular piece of literature to treat of the character of Arthur, and the first work ever to mention the Round Table; as a result, the account of the reign of Arthur has all too frequently been studied in isolation from the surrounding narrative, thus distorting the way the work was perceived. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed by modern readers, this is not a romance in the current sense of the term: anyone looking here for lovelorn ladies and knights indulging in lengthy self-analysis will be disappointed. In his epilogue (14859), the poet himself refers to the work as ‘la geste des Bretuns’, indicating a historical narrative (or one perceived as such), focussing on the deeds of a specific nation or lineage. The prevailing tone is more epic than courtly; to quote Hans-Erich Keller, ‘Wace continue bien plus la tradition des chansons de geste … qu'il n'est le précurseur de la littérature courtoise.’ The nature of the work is announced in the Prologue (1–8):

    Ki vult oïr e vult saveir

    De rei en rei e d'eir en eir

    Ki cil furent e dunt il vindrent

    Ki Engleterre primes tindrent,

    Quels reis i ad en ordre eü

    Ki anceis e ki puis i fu,

    Maistre Wace l'ad translaté

    Ki en conte la verité.

    The reader or listener is approaching a work of history, based on a pattern of dynastic succession. No specific sources are acknowledged, but the implication is that they are scholarly and authoritative in nature; in particular, the stress on the correct chronological order of rulers evokes the clarity of annalistic accounts. These sources have been adapted (‘translaté’), with truthfulness and accuracy (‘vérité’) as a guiding principle.

  • 2 - La Conception Nostre Dame

  • from Part I - Wace: hagiographer
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 30-50

  • Summary

    As we have seen, scholars tend to place the Conception Nostre Dame relatively early in the poet's career, before his Vie de saint Nicolas. The main reason for this is that in the Nicolas the reader can more readily discern the Wace of the Roman de Brut, whereas (to put things bluntly) the Conception was not considered to be very good literature. The first editors of the poem, G. Mancel and G.-S. Trébutien (1842), despite their more favourable opinion of Wace than many of their contemporaries, felt that he had not made the best use of his sources in this case; according to them the poet

    est loin d'avoir compris la poésie des traditions dont il s'inspirait…. Il retranche les détails les plus gracieux, et les remplace par d'interminables énumerations qu'il paraît affectionner particulièrement.

    William R. Ashford, in his 1932 critical edition of the Conception, is especially damning: ‘The Conception de Nostre Dame has little literary merit. Its interest for modern students is almost wholly linguistic’ (p. 20). This appears to reflect Ashford's own interest in philology above literary analysis, however; whilst the observations of Mancel and Trébutien alert us to the extent of Wace's reworking of his sources, suggesting hidden depths to the poem.

    The Conception Nostre Dame is (notwithstanding the title by which the poem is now known) a Life of the Virgin from her Conception to her Dormition and Assumption. The sources on which the work is based were mainstream by medieval standards, though they were not part of the canonical corpus of Scriptures. The De nativitate Mariae, a hybrid text combining a variety of earlier apocryphal material and dating from the Carolingian period (or possibly as late as the tenth century) was used for the section devoted to the conception and birth of Mary, her own pregnancy and Joseph's misgivings. The story of the three Marys was drawn from a version of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (composed in Latin between 550 and 700), the Trinubium Annae, known to have been in circulation from the ninth century and recounting the three marriages of Saint Anne (mother of the Virgin), the three daughters, all named Mary, she had of each marriage, and the offspring of these daughters, among whom it counts St John the Evangelist.

  • 7 - The ancestors of William the Conqueror

  • from Part III - Le Roman de Rou
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 160-208

  • Summary

    The Roman de Rou is made up of four different parts, distinguished by metre and style as well as by their specific function within the overall scheme of the Roman de Rou. The Chronique Ascendante, in monorhyme stanzas containing a varying number of lines (of twelve syllables), shares its formal characteristics with the Deuxième Partie, and the Première Partie, in octosyllabic couplets, announces the Troisième Partie, also in octosyllabic couplets. Wace seems to have planned his poem on a principle of stylistic alternation, possibly reflecting the shifting influences of his various sources, but also pointing to three main phases in the narrative: the origins of the Normans (Première Partie), the first dukes (Deuxième Partie), and the more recent rulers (Troisième Partie). Whatever the vagaries of manuscript transmission and later reception, these three Parts were almost certainly meant to be read in sequence when Wace started his project. The rule of Richard I is thus divided between the Deuxième Partie, where we are told about his childhood, and the Troisième Partie, where we move on to his achievements as a grown man. I shall therefore consider the constituent parts of the Roman de Rou in succession, as one complex narrative.

    Chronique Ascendante

    The Chronique Ascendante, a concise ascending genealogy of the present ruler with accompanying mention of some of the salient events in the lives of the different dukes, serves as a table of contents for the work proper in a format both compact and easy to memorise. The metre selected appears to be an experiment on Wace's part. The monorhyme stanzas recall strongly the laisses of the chanson de geste, with its epic-heroic stance and claims to a collectively validated authoritative voice, whilst the choice of dodecasyllabic lines with frequent enjambement, as opposed to the self-contained, predominantly decasyllabic line characteristic of the chanson de geste, gives the poem a distinctive rhythm which would have distinguished it clearly from the chanson for its listeners. The implicit message is clear: this is to be a celebratory, epic piece of work, sharing with the chanson de geste a spirit of communal bonding through a quasi-ritual commemoration of past ancestral deeds, but nevertheless with a difference in credentials.

  • Part I - Wace: hagiographer

  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 11-12

  • Summary

    INTRODUCTION: DATES AND CONTEXT

    Wace's earliest extant works are three religious poems, all in octosyllabic couplets: a Life of Saint Margaret (La Vie de sainte Marguerite, 746 lines), an account of the Conception and Life of Our Lady (La Conception Nostre Dame, 1810 lines), and a Life of Saint Nicholas (La Vie de saint Nicolas, 1563 lines). They have not attracted the critical attention one might have expected, partly because of a scholarly bias against religious literature in general throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, and partly, one suspects, because these early poems do not correspond to the image of courtly poet prevalent among admirers of Wace's later work. Predictably, perhaps, both their authorship and literary value were questioned. The issue of authorship has now been settled, though there remains a lingering sense that these poems date back to a time when the poet was not yet in full command of his literary technique, and had not yet achieved sufficient recognition to secure commissions from prestigious patrons. Neither of these assumptions is necessarily borne out by the evidence of the texts. Like most writers of his period, Wace was first and foremost a cleric, and it is fitting that he should have made his name with pious works, the status of which, particularly in the case of hagiography, would have been no less authoritative and respectable than that of any other scholarly text. Moreover, it would be anachronistic to assume that a religious community (such as one of the Caen abbeys) or an ecclesiastical grandee would have been less desirable, prestigious or influential a patron than a lay aristocrat. Indeed, during the troubled years between the death of Henry I and the accession to the throne of England of Henry II, ecclesiastical patronage may well have been preferable on all counts. All three of Wace's surviving religious pieces appear to have been commissioned, though in one case only (Nicolas) are we given the name of the patron; and in all three cases it is possible to discern an underlying agenda which the poet was entrusted with advancing.

  • Conclusion

  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 279-286

  • Summary

    Having come to an end of our survey of Wace's surviving works, it may be concluded that the most salient feature of his oeuvre is the consistency of his approach. The five characteristics of the poet's religious works listed in the conclusion to Part I apply equally to both the Roman de Brut and virtually all of the Roman de Rou. These characteristics were:

    1. The use of more than one source.

    In the case of the hagiographical poems, it could be argued that the plurality of sources used by Wace was dictated by the agenda his patron(s) wished him to fulfil. His brief was never merely to transpose into French a Latin original, it would seem, but to produce an up-to-date version of the legends or Lives, taking account of all the information scattered in all available sources. In the simplest case, La Vie de sainte Marguerite, this led to a narrative based on one main source, into which relevant elements from a second version of the legend were seamlessly woven. With La Vie de saint Nicolas, which is essentially a compendium of miracles, the approach is more compilatory, but with a discrimination and selectiveness not usually connected with compilation. Wace used more than two sources here, showing that his work was intended to be an entirely new redaction of the Life of the saint. Finally, La Conception Nostre Dame is a highly complex piece of writing, gathering together an impressive number of sources in what is a completely new, independently thought-out account of the Life of the Virgin.

    The evidence of the Roman de Brut, where such research would not seem to have been necessary, shows that the gathering of material related to the subject to be treated was a routine stage in Wace's preparation. He thus studied both the text authored by Geoffrey of Monmouth, known as the vulgate version of the Historia Regum Britanniae, and its revised (or Variant) version, by an anonymous redactor.

  • 1 - La Vie de sainte Marguerite

  • from Part I - Wace: hagiographer
  • F. H. M. Le Saux, Françoise H. M. Le Saux is Senior Lecturer of French Studies at The University of Reading, Reading, UK.
  • Book:
    A Companion to Wace
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2017
    Print publication:
    01 June 2005, pp 13-29

  • Summary

    It is generally accepted that the oldest work of Wace's to have come down to us is his Vie de sainte Marguerite. It is preserved in three manuscripts only, none of which preserve the dialect of composition i.e., Norman French:

  • Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, 927, a paper manuscript copied in the late thirteenth century, probably in the Touraine area. This manuscript, which is best known for preserving the only extant text of the twelfth-century play Le Jeu d'Adam, also contains Wace's Conception Nostre Dame. The beginning of Wace's Marguerite is incomplete due to damage; the poem is copied on folios 205–215v.

  • Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, 3516, a parchment manuscript in the Picard dialect, copied in Flanders or northern Artois in the mid thirteenth century (possibly at Hesdin, the court of the counts of Artois; the manuscript was probably completed in 1267/8). ‘De sainte Marguerite’ (fol. 125r–126v) is the twenty-seventh of sixty-three legends, which also include Wace's Vie de saint Nicolas and his Conception Nostre Dame. The manuscript contains 81 miniatures, none of which, however, appear in the ‘Marguerite’ section.

  • Troyes, Bibliothèque municipale 1905, was copied in north-eastern France (southern Vosges or north-eastern Franche-Comté, probably at the court of Jeanne of Burgundy) in the fourteenth century; it is lavishly illustrated, with miniatures that can be dated to 1320–1330. The manuscript contains a variety of religious works in French and in Latin, predominantly hymns and prayers to the Virgin.

    • The Paris and the Troyes texts of Marguerite tend to abridge the poem slightly, and are considered by Hans-Erich Keller to be derived from a hypothetical picard ‘modernisation’ of Wace's work, itself based on a lost Picard copy which was also used by the scribe of the Tours manuscript. The Tours version of the poem is therefore deemed to be closest to Wace's ‘original’.

    Saint Margaret was a very popular saint in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in Normandy, England and Flanders; this may to some extent account for the fact that this apparently unexceptional poem was appreciated beyond Wace's native Normandy, and still copied as late as the fourteenth century.

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