LOVING TEACHING: STATUS, EXCHANGE, AND TRANSLATION IN PIERRE D'ABERNON'S "LUMERE AS LAIS"

Abstract

In the course of the thirteenth century, in the wake of decades of religious reform and growing lay pressure for adequate religious teaching, there was an enormous production of materials for pastoral care: handbooks for preachers and confessors, sermon collections, synodal decrees about the instruction of the laity. While efforts at improving pastoral care were certainly under way before the Fourth Lateran Council in 121 5, the Council's canons, as Leonard Boyle puts it, 'gave both ... parochial priests and the cura animarum or parishioners an identity and a self-awareness, and an honorable, recognized place in the church at large', and significantly influenced the output of pastoral works.1 The new self-awareness Boyle speaks of is evident in a subset of those works: French translations or compendia of doctrinal instruction, often in verse. Such works were particularly popular in England, and seemingly directed, as Nicholas Watson has suggested, at 'aristocrats, gentryfolk, parish priests, and the urban laity'.2 Translating Latin learning - what the French texts call 'clergie' - into the vernacular involved a transfer to the laity of the very quality whose lack supposedly distinguished them from their clerical teachers. These texts' reflection on their own project of education, and on the collaborative as well as competitive relationship between authors and audiences, teachers and students, shows us a culture in transition developing pragmatic, thoughtful ways of accommodating a major shift in the assessment of education and educability. My discussion centres on Pierre d'Abernon's Anglo-French Lumere as lais, an encyclopedic account, in verse, of Christian doctrine completed in 1267. Looking at Pierre's text in the context of similar works offers a way of sketching the development of a new audience for religious teaching and the new forms of composition and address that it necessitated.That doctrinal handbooks like the Lumere were a needed resource is demonstrated by the numerous manuscript copies that survive; the Lumere itself, for instance, exists in twenty known manuscripts, or fragments of them.3 The aim of such works, as the title of the Manuel des pechiet^ (f.1260) suggests, was to give quite literally 'handy' access to basic Christian knowledge. The Manuels author, William of Waddington, explains his title as follows: 'Le Manuel est apele, / Car en main deit estre porte. / L'alme aprent rectifier, / A chescun deit estre le plus chier' ('It is called the handbook, because it should be carried in the hand. It teaches one to correct the soul and should be very dear to each person').4 A number of these works survive in small manuscripts containing one or a few texts that a parish priest, for example, could have carried with him.5 Other surviving manuscripts, however, seem to have been designed more as compendia that could include a broad range of texts conveying basic Christian learning in the vernacular and claiming at least a potential lay audience for their teachings.That such works of doctrine formed a reasonably coherent genre is suggested by British Library, Royal MS 20.B.XIV, a late thirteenth- or early fourteenthcentury manuscript that offers a comprehensive collection of works of this type, though the Eumere in this case is not among them. It contains, in order, the Manuel des pechiet^ (which survives in twenty-eight manuscripts including this one), the basis for Robert Mannyng of Brunne's Middle English Handlyng Synne; St Edmund Rich's Mirour de Seinte Eglise (twenty-eight manuscripts), a guide to contemplation that was also translated into Middle English; the selfexplanatory Exhortation to Love God (two manuscripts); the Roman de Philosophie, by Simond de Freine (three manuscripts), an adaptation of Boethius' Consolatio Philosophiae; a poem on The Corruption of the World (unique to this collection); Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour, a doctrinal allegory depicting Mary as a castle that protects Christians (nineteen manuscripts); the Roman des romans (ten manuscripts), a verse homily on the corruption of the world; a collection of Miracles of the Virgin (two manuscripts); and the Petit Sermon (ten manuscripts), a verse sermon on loving and fearing God. …