The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation ed. by Amy V. Ogden

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation ed. by Amy V. Ogden Joan Tasker Grimbert amy v. ogden, ed. and trans., The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation. MLA Texts and Translations. New York: MLA, 2021. Pp. 192. isbn: 978-1-60329-505-5. $17. A new edition (and translation) of the Vie de sainte Eufrosine (VSE) was long overdue, and doubtless no one was in a better position to undertake it than Amy Ogden. Early in her graduate studies, she read Raymond T. Hill's 1919 edition of the poem (Romanic Review 10: 159–69 and 191–232) and eventually chose to write her dissertation on VSE's clerical and secular culture, a study she published in 2003 as Hagiography, Romance and La Vie de sainte Eufrosine (Princeton: Edward C. Armstrong Monographs). The VSE is contained in four manuscripts and Ogden based her edition on the oldest one, which is catalogued as Canon. Misc. MS 74 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University (O). It contains anonymous saints' lives and other didactic texts, including the Vie de saint Alexis and the Vie de sainte Marie l'Egyptienne. Linguistic features suggest that the VSE was composed around 1200 in the West of France or Wallonia and copied in western Wallonia shortly thereafter. Although Ogden uses the same base manuscript as Hill, she has taken a considerably less interventionist approach. MS O presents stanza-laisses of variable lengths (nine to forty lines), an arrangement that Ogden preserves, whereas Hill had reordered them as a series of ten-line stanzas and filled in 'missing lines' based on the other three codices. Ogden limits her corrections to nonsensical words or phrases and preserves the text's linguistic idiosyncrasies. The goal of her 'single-manuscript edition' is to replicate as much as possible the experience of someone reading MS O around 1200. Given current interest in LGBTQ concerns, this new edition is quite timely because Eufrosine is one of a group of saints known as monachoparthenoi ('monk virgins'), women who, eschewing the traditional role reserved for young ladies of their time (marriage and motherhood), don men's clothing and leave their parents' home to pursue a religious vocation. The VSE poet, though anonymous, was clearly someone who was educated in clerical subjects but also conversant with secular culture and knew how to apply some of the poetic techniques of epic and romance to hagiography. Since Eufrosine chooses to enter a Benedictine monastery, the poet may have been a Benedictine monk, or even a nun. Speculation that the poet was a woman has been fueled by certain passages in the VSE, but since the text offers contradictory clues to authorial gender, Ogden suggests referring to the author as neither she nor he. By using they, she notes, 'we not only [End Page 107] acknowledge the indeterminacy of the anonymous poet's gender but also respect the poet's apparent efforts to convey an identity that exceeds binary gender categories' (p. xiii). Ogden's excellent translation is idiomatic but hews closely to the Old French text. She is scrupulous about respecting the poet's indications of gender. But, as she explains (pp. xlvi–vii), it's a tricky business: possessive adjectives in Old French are ambiguous since they agree with the gender of the noun they modify rather than that of the subject, and the subject pronoun is often omitted. Moreover, Eufrosine herself complicates matters. She presents herself at the abbey dressed as a knight and claims to have served at court as a eunuch. When the abbot gives her the name 'Emerald,' he notes that it is a name given to both men and women. Since everyone at the monastery sees the new recruit as a man (albeit so beautiful that Emerald must live isolated from the other monks lest their sexual desires be aroused!), Ogden follows the VSE poet in referring to Emerald as a woman only when conveying her private thoughts or when she finally reveals her identity to her father. There is no evidence for the historical existence of Eufrosine (or 'Euphrosyne'), but she has been celebrated as a model...