The Middle English Partonope of Blois: Fragmentary Texts and Fragmentary Manuscripts

Abstract

The romance of Partonope of Blois, which references the legend of Cupid and Psyche (only in reverse—it is the male lover who breaks the taboo) and the motif of the offended fée, which derives ultimately from Celtic sources, has a justifiable claim to be one of the most widely-read of English romances in the fifteenth century. It survives in two versions—one in couplets, the other stanzaic—in six manuscripts. Yet only one edition exists, dating from 1912, and only one, unsatisfactory, attempt to describe the manuscripts has been made, in 1976. All copies of the twelve-thousand-word text are incomplete to some extent, but this article describes five in detail: two where the texts themselves are fragmentary, that is where a third to a half of the copies are missing; and three where the text survives only in fragmentary material form. Two of these latter were apparently used as strengthening material in the boards and in the spine of later books, while the third, the only extant copy of the stanzaic version, is a much corrupted, and brief, retelling of the story in a miscellaneous volume, the chief content of which is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This article, which is supplemented by photographs, describes these five manuscripts afresh and attempts to answer the question of the physical characteristics of the volumes in which they circulated. The conclusion examines these survivals in the context of other fragmentary copies of romances.