Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Wace: his life and times
- Part I Wace: hagiographer
- 1 La Vie de sainte Marguerite
- 2 La Conception Nostre Dame
- 3 La Vie de saint Nicolas
- Conclusion
- Part II Le Roman de Brut
- Part III Le Roman de Rou
- Conclusion: the epilogue
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
1 - La Vie de sainte Marguerite
from Part I - Wace: hagiographer
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Wace: his life and times
- Part I Wace: hagiographer
- 1 La Vie de sainte Marguerite
- 2 La Conception Nostre Dame
- 3 La Vie de saint Nicolas
- Conclusion
- Part II Le Roman de Brut
- Part III Le Roman de Rou
- Conclusion: the epilogue
- Conclusion
- Select bibliography
- Index
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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- Information
- A Companion to Wace , pp. 13 - 29Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005