Abstract
Everyone knows some basic facts about the early fourteenth-century poet Robert Manning of Brunne. He is responsible for two large works derived from Anglo-Norman texts. He dates them both, Handling Sin (from William of Waddington’s Manuel des péchéz) in 1303, and the Chronicle of England (from Wace and Peter Langtoft) in 1338. Given that, in the first of these poems, Manning says he had been a Gilbertine canon of Sempringham for fifteen years, he thus is ascribed an active floruit of half a century—and will, like his immediate contemporary, Michel of Northgate, have been close to seventy when he concluded his oeuvre.1 This narrative has always seemed to me perplexing, if not peculiar. How does anyone who has cranked out nearly 13,000 lines of decent poetry just shut up for more than thirty years? And why start up again, after a three decades hiatus and at an advanced age? And then produce 24,000 lines more?
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