A Fragment of a Lost Chanson de geste

Abstract

The Broxbourne collection in the Bodleian Library is a collection of rare binding specimens presented to the Library in 1978 through the Friends of the National Libraries by John Ehrman, in memory of his father. Broxb. 28.17 is an octavo edition of Josephus’s Antiquitates judaicae, published in Lyon in 1528. It is in an early sixteenth-century calf binding that features blind-stamped panels that seem to have been used in England. The binding contains three waste fragments: two vellum strips form upper and lower endleaf guards, while a single folio from a printed quarto serves as a lower endpaper. The present article concerns the lower endleaf guard, a strip cut from one folio, which contains a fragment of a text written in three columns. The fragment gives a disjointed but reconstructable narrative of a siege of Orange in an Anglo-Norman redaction, copied in the late thirteenth century. It conforms to the poem, Le Siège d’Orange, whose existence has been hypothesised by many scholars in the last century. A transcription of the fragment is accompanied by a commentary, which highlights the relationship between the fragment and other poems from the Guillaume Cycle.