Anglo-Norman Texts Research Articles

Book Review of "Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts"

Book review of Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts.

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts by Liam Lewis (review)

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts by Liam Lewis (review)

Charlemagne’s Defeat in the Pyrenees: The Battle of Rencesvals. By Xabier Irujo

The Battle of Roncevaux has been much studied; here, exceptionally, it is approached from the perspective of Basque history by a historian familiar with the topography of the area. Xabier Irujo uses an extensive range of original sources to reconstruct the narrative of the lead-up to the battle (Chapter 1), the Campaign of 778 (Chapter 2), the battle itself (Chapter 3), and consequences of the battle (Chapter 4), before turning his attention to the importance of the battle in medieval tradition (Chapter 5), specifically the Chanson de Roland, the Historia Caroli Magni et Rotholandi (Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle), and the window of Chartres Cathedral. Basque terms are used to designate Roncesvalles (Errozabel) and the Basque country (Vasconia). The author’s strengths are his understanding of the topography and focus on original sources, but it would have been helpful to have had more engagement with — and discussion of — the views of other historians, such as Rosamond McKitterick (Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)), who is footnoted, or Janet L. Nelson, whose recent book, King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), is not used at all. The author’s view, that the whole campaign was against the Basques (p. 37), would carry more weight if consideration was also given to the traditional view that the Spanish campaign had been undertaken in response to a request from Ibn al-ʿArabī (see McKitterick, Charlemagne, p. 34). When the author contests the description of the battle as a ‘skirmish’, he does not footnote historians who disagree. He does engage with other scholars in the discussion of the size of armies involved (pp. 41–43). The final chapter, on the battle in medieval tradition, briefly describes some of the literary accounts of the events. Of most interest here is a translation into English of a nineteenth-century Basque poem (pp. 149–51). An appendix lists and discusses the historical sources. There is some confusion here and in the bibliography: for example, La Chanson de Roland: The French Corpus (general editor Joseph J. Duggan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005)) is listed as ‘in English’ and published in 2000 by the Anglo-Norman Text Society; C. M. Bowra’s classic study Heroic Poetry (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964) is listed as an edition of William of Malmesbury’s De gestis regnum Anglorum. The bibliography includes both primary and secondary material, thus separating the different editions of the same text. Limited access to libraries during the pandemic may explain the use of older editions and translations readily available on the internet rather than more recent scholarly editions. The discussion of the Chanson de Roland manuscript in Chapter 5 also draws heavily on older palaeographic studies. The book is readable and nicely produced with a helpful abstract at the head of each chapter. The study has a potential — which greater engagement with other views would have helped fulfil — to open new perspectives in this important event in both medieval history and the medieval imaginary, namely the neglected perspective of the Basques.

Nourritures terrestres et nourritures spirituelles dans "La Vie de Saint Gilles" de Guillaume de Berneville

La Vie de saint Gilles, texto anglonormando de finales del siglo XII escrito por Guillaume de Berneville, es una reescritura de una Vitae latina del siglo X. Las Vidas en lenguas vernáculas surgidas en el contexto anglonormando tienen como finalidad la de edificar a los fieles, a la vez que la de entretener y divertir. Guillaume de Berneville no duda en alternar motivos literarios paganos, con motivos hagiográficos tradicionales, para hacer más accesible la Vida a un público laico. El objetivo de este trabajo es el de analizar cómo el autor utiliza el motivo de la comida y el ayuno, uno de los preceptos del ascetismo, a la hora de estructurar y dar coherencia a su relato hagiográfico. La Vie de saint Gilles, an Anglo-Norman text from the late twelfth century written by Guillaume de Berneville, is a rewriting of a Latin Vitae from the tenth century. Lives in vernacular languages emerged in the Anglo-Norman context are intended to edify the faithful, as well as giving entertainment and fun. Guillaume de Berneville does not hesitate to alternate pagan literary motifs with traditional hagiographic motifs, to make Life more accessible to a lay public. The objective of this work is to analyse how the author uses the motive of food and fasting, one of the precepts of asceticism, when structuring and giving coherence to his hagiographic account.

Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein

Reviewed by: Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire ed. by Susanna Fein Daron Burrows susanna fein, ed., Interpreting MS Digby 86: A Trilingual Book from Thirteenth-Century Worcestershire. Manuscript Culture in the British Isles Vol. 9. York: York Medieval Press, 2019. Pp. xix, 310. isbn: 9781903153901. £60. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 86 is a commonplace book generally thought, on the basis of manuscript-internal evidence, to have been copied by Richard de Grimhill II in Worcestershire in the years 1281–83. As a voluminous trilingual anthology preserving a heterogeneous mix of prose and verse texts, its importance to our understanding of the Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin literary culture of medieval Britain has long been recognized, and the impetus provided by the EETS printing of a black-and-white facsimile of the manuscript (ed. Tschann and Parkes, 1996) and, more recently, by the full-color publication on Digital Bodleian has inspired this worthy collection of essays seeking to build upon the earlier work on the manuscript by Stengel, Miller, Meier-Ewert, Corrie, and others. [End Page 124] Delbert Russell argues that the copy of Wace's Miracles de seint Nicholas, with its combination of the terrestrial and the celestial, forms a bridge between the unequivocally pious and the sometimes shockingly secular material transmitted in the manuscript; he also offers a stimulating orthographical analysis which contributes significantly to the study of the copyist's scripta. Maureen Boulton relates the opening six items of the manuscript, a variety of pastoralia, to the enthusiastic promotion by English bishops, such as Cantilupe of Worcester, of the canons of Lateran IV, convincingly identifying minor modifications which ensure that the doctrinal material is entirely consonant with the cura animarum in the late thirteenth century, and demonstrating that these concerns are reflected in various of the explicitly religious Anglo-Norman texts which appear later in the manuscript. Sheri Smith discusses the organization and significance of the thirty-one prayers in the manuscript, appearing in six clusters organized in various ways by language and theme; an important conclusion drawn is that Anglo-Norman features as the principal language of prayer, with English a later addition. Marjorie Harrington explains the practical emphasis of the first section of the manuscript, as it moves from pastoralia for the soul to medical recipes for the body, and thence to texts including charms, experimenta, and prognosticatory material. Jennifer Jahner concentrates specifically on the experimenta—a combination of practical tips, chemical experiments, and party tricks—as a possible metaphor for the project of the manuscript itself, an exercise of trial and error as the scribe attempts to craft a new form of book. David Raybin argues that the French version of Petrus Alfonsi's Disciplina clericalis, as the longest text in the manuscript, occupies a pivotal position in introducing a series of literary texts; separate appendices provide a concordance of the French and Latin narratives, and editions with translations of the tales seen as analogues to The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Marilyn Corrie exposes the wealth of misogynistic material present in the manuscript, hypothesizing that the Digby compiler's choices in this regard may have reflected his own predilections. Neil Cartlidge focuses on the numerous texts across the manuscript featuring an antagonistic relationship between men and women, concluding that 'the shared insistence on the inevitability of gendered antagonism is in the service of a determined playfulness, with gendered experiences and gendered perspectives being mined, in effect, as a source of sociability' (p. 161). Susanna Fein summarizes the Middle English content of the manuscript, drawing attention to the patterns of organization and providing an inventory of texts cross-referenced with other manuscript copies, as well as editions with translations of The Fox and The Wolf and Dame Sirith. Jenni Nuttall considers the use of paratextual features to highlight verse structures, with particular attention to the scribe's distinctive use of tie-lines. J.D. Sargan offers a detailed analysis of the numerous forms of colored initial 'A' found in the manuscript, comparing the scribe's experimentation with attested types to a jazz musician improvizing on the basis of learned structures. John Hines and Melissa Julian-Jones...

The Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of ‘La Vie de seint Clement’ by Daron Burrows

 Reviews not, on the whole, go in for this kind of comparative analysis—but this collection nevertheless provides valuable stimulus towards further work on Coe’s place within the emerging traditions of twenty-first-century writing. L U M G e Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of ‘La Vie de seint Clement’. By D B. (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, . e French of England Translation Series, ) Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. . xii+ pp. $. ISBN ––––. Daron Burrows’s translation of the Anglo-French version of the ,-line Life of Saint Clement found (only) in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.., forms the tenth volume in the French of England Translation series (FRETS), but it might also be regarded as a companion volume, and as a necessary complement, to his own three-volume edition of this text for the Anglo-Norman Text Society (volumes –, , and , published in , , and  respectively). Altogether, the four volumes offer an extraordinarily thorough presentation and analysis of this text—and an impressive testament to industrious scholarship. In his Introduction to the FRETS translation Burrows offers a wide-ranging and enterprising account of the poem, including a summary of the text; a brief description of the manuscript; a careful explanation of the Anglo-French Life’s place within the complex and very extensive tradition of ‘pseudo-Clementine’ texts; accounts of the author’s treatment of his sources, style, and versification; a useful discussion of Saint Clement’s cult and of the representation of the figure of Simon Magus (the archetypical wicked magician); and finally a consideration of the ways in which the text might reflect the educational and pastoral objectives of the Fourth Lateran Council of . In all of this, very considerable learning is on show, and a great deal of secondary material is cited along the way (see, for example, the extensive annotation to the discussion of French of England religious and hagiographical literature on pp. –), but never at the cost of accessibility: Burrows’s presentation of the issues is always elegant and engaging. As to the translation itself, Burrows says that he has tried to ‘reflect the general extent of repetition and relatively limited vocabulary of the text’ (p. ), but the effect of this was not particularly evident to me. If anything, the register of the translation seems quite high, with a distinct tendency towards the Latinate. So, to give just one example, lines – (‘nus ne devum leissier mie | Dreiture pur avuerie’) become ‘we must not abandon rectitude on account of affection’. In this case, it is a style that is by no means inappropriate to the original. Indeed, it might be said to draw attention to argument and eloquence in a way that only reflects the Life’s own self-conscious thematization of formal disputation and debate. e French also has a tendency to syntactical complexity (on which Burrows remarks at page ), and the translation does not hide this: but again, this seems entirely MLR, .,   appropriate, given how deeply this text seems to be invested in the very idea of elaborately thoughtful speech. U  D N C Philippe de Mézières, rhétorique et poétique. Ed. by J B with R B-K and A C. Geneva: Droz. .  pp. €.. ISBN ––––. Oratio tragedica. By P  M. Ed. and trans. by J B and A C. Geneva: Droz. .  pp. €. ISBN ––– –. ese two new volumes by Droz testify to the continuing interest in the legacy of the fascinating and versatile figure of Philippe de Mézières (–), the Frenchman whose long career as a soldier, diplomat, and mystic—and a prolific writer—encompasses the better part of the fourteenth century. Rhétorique et poétique is dedicated to Mézières’s poetics and follows on the heels of two previous volumes which scrutinize his work against, respectively, a Mediterranean and a European political, intellectual, and religious background (Philippe de Mézières and his Age: Piety and Politics in the Fourteenth Century, ed. by Kiril Petkov and Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski (Leiden: Brill, ); Philippe de Mézières et l’Europe: nouvelle histoire, nouveaux espaces, nouveaux langages, ed. by Joël Blanchard and Renate...

Later Additions to the Anglo-Norman Texts of British Library, Add. MS 598391

Later Additions to the Anglo-Norman Texts of British Library, Add. MS 598391

Robert Manning: Some Textual—and Biographical—Emendations

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?

The variable use of determiners in Old French and the argument DP hypothesis

AbstractTheargument DP hypothesis, adopted by many syntactic analyses, claims that nominal arguments are introduced by a determiner (D), which may be covert or overt. While overt D is obligatory in Modern French (consistent with the argument DP hypothesis), it was not obligatory in earlier stages of French. We explore the factors that contributed to this change – includingsemantic class, syntactic function, number, anddefiniteness – focusing on a shift that occurred in the D-paradigm in two Anglo-Norman texts of the 12th century. Quantitative analysis (Goldvarb) yields two major findings. First, the effect ofsyntactic functionremains constant: subject position favours overt D, but object position inhibits it. Second, there is a change in the effect ofsemantic class: count nouns increasingly favour overt D, but non-count (mass and abstract) nouns increasingly inhibit it. More generally, the gradual disappearance of bare Ns in French reflects the emergence of paradigmatically conditioned D.

The trajectory of φ-features on Old French D and n

AbstractOld French (OF) determiners (D), which are optional, show a three-way split between definite (def), indefinite(indf), and expletive(expl)D. We develop a nano-syntactic analysis of these three paradigms, according to which the nominal spine is associated with a series of functional heads that include Number, Gender, D, and Kase. We test the predictions of the formal analysis with a quantitative analysis of corpus data from two 12thcentury Anglo-Norman texts –Le voyage de saint Brendan(B) andLais de Marie de France(MdF) – which indicates that over a 60-year span, there are changes in the distribution of D. This presents itself in three ways. First, a decline in expletive D inMdFcorrelates with an increase in the use of D with masculine (m) non-count nouns (nNON-CT) Second, whileBlacks an overt indefinite plural (pl) D,MdFhas one in the form ofdes. Third, with count nouns(nCT), while feminine (f) nouns favour the absence of determiners inB, there is no gender effect inMdF. While the first two changes are predicted by the formal analysis, the third is not. More broadly, the results of our quantitative study provide a more nuanced picture of the factors that govern the distribution of D in OF: they confirm that – relative to conditioning the absence of D (D-drop) – definiteness, grammatical function, and number are stable factors, gender is not a stable factor, and word order does not play a significant role.

ELIZABETH DEARNLEY. Translators and Their Prologues in Medieval England

Elizabeth Dearnley’s study provides a rich, informative, and often sensitive discussion of a wide range of questions regarding translation and multilingualism in medieval Britain, with particular focus on the evolving function of translators’ prologues. The core of the book is constituted by an analysis of prologues in French > English translations during the period of ca. 1200–1500. The monograph begins with three focused chapters arguing for the importance of considering translators’ prologues as a distinctive subgenre. Chapter 1 concentrates on prologues to Latin works and early French translations, followed by a chapter on Germanic and Anglo-Saxon translators’ prologues, and a third chapter on the emergence of a new kind of prologue specific to later, French > English translations in the period of ca. 1200–1500. These are in many ways the most rewarding and most compelling chapters of the volume, and provide an illuminating comparison of the different developments of the Romance tradition of translation on the one hand, and of the Germanic tradition on the other. Both of these traditions can be shown to have influenced the emergence of the later prologue to Middle English translations of French or Anglo-Norman texts, produced in the uniquely complex environment of multilingual post-conquest England. The author emphasizes in particular the tendency of Germanic languages to consider Latin as a conceptually distinct foreign medium, allowing translators to assert the autonomy and authority of their own vernacular, and its suitability for addressing complex, intellectually challenging questions. This self-confidence is clearly reflected in the development of pre-conquest ‘English’ translators’ prologues, which are largely free from any apologetic formulations. Romance languages, by comparison, were marked by a far closer, often more uncomfortable and conflicted relationship with Latin because of linguistic proximity. On the one hand, this could be exploited to the advantage of the vernacular, since it enabled the transference of Latin terms to ennoble the vernacular, and in turn led to the emergence of French as a prestige vernacular. At the same time, this very procedure presupposes an awareness of the ‘inferiority’ of the vernacular in relation to Latin. Chapter 3 discusses how these earlier traditions interact and combine to shape the environment in which a new kind of Middle English translators’ prologue can emerge. While this new kind of prologue was never fixed or formalized, a number of recurrent features can be identified (p. 64), and the author proceeds to discuss a representative selection of 26 Middle English prologues in chronological order, first listed on pp. 10–11. The chapter traces the gradual emergence of English as a ‘national’ vernacular, and the corresponding development of a more elaborate and self-conscious form of translator’s prologue. Many other issues are touched on in these three chapters, such as the interrelation of practices of enarratio and translation in early texts, the precocity of Anglo-Norman translation more generally, the emergence of French as a prestige vernacular, and the continuities and parallels between Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and later Middle English translation practices.

Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

Cultivating the Heart: Feeling and Emotion in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Religious Texts

La Vie seint Edmund le rei

From the early twelfth century, the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds was instrumental in the establishing of a textual tradition around its patron saint, and it is in this context that towards the end of the twelfth century Denis Piramus wrote his life of St Edmund. His work was notable for being the first extended treatment and consolidation of the legend in French. D. W. Russell's new edition makes excellent use of Ian Short's and William Rothwell's work in the field to present the text in a long-awaited new light (see Short, ‘Denis Piramus and the Truth of Marie's Lais’, Cultura neolatina, 67 (2007), 319–40, and Rothwell, ‘The Life and Miracles of St Edmund: A Recently Discovered Manuscript’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 60 (1977–78), 135–80): it was previously edited by Hilding Kjellman in 1935 (La Vie seint Edmund le rei, poème anglo-normand du xiie siècle (Gothenburg: no pub.)). In Rothwell's article the then recently discovered Rylands manuscript of the text (French MS 142) was already compared favourably against London, British Library, MS Cotton Domitian A XI (the only other manuscript copy of the text, which formed the basis of Kjellman's edition), and was shown to preserve a more original, albeit slightly incomplete version of the text. Russell's edition rightfully reverts to the Rylands manuscript as its base text, thus aiming finally to present a modern audience with a more authentic version of the life. The sixty-four page Introduction, as we have come to expect from the Anglo-Norman Text Society series, offers a wide-ranging discussion of the text, with scholarly (re-)examinations of authorship (expanding upon Short's work on the association of the author with a magister Dionisius), date, Latin as well as non-textual sources (though without considering the possible influence of Ælfric's late tenth-century English translation of Abbo of Fleury's Passio), and audiences (pointing out the appeal and political significance of this text to the baronial classes). Close attention is given to the language, with particularly thorough analysis of Piramus's relatively uncommon lexis useful for incorporation into the Anglo-Norman Dictionary. Of special note is Kathryn A. Smith's twenty-four page art-historical excursus on the forty-two illustrations to the text in the Rylands manuscript. As well as giving detailed descriptions of the drawings (complementary to the online images of the entire manuscript available on the website of the John Rylands Library, though no longer at the address provided in the edition (p. 18, n. 46), but at <http://enriqueta.man.ac.uk/luna/servlet> [accessed 19 January 2016]), she also interprets how these fourteenth-century illustrations expand upon or transform the twelfth-century text. The main text itself is presented with minimal editorial interventions, although octosyllabic metre and grammatical concord are restored whenever such a change is believed to be straightforward (and sometimes corroborated by the London manuscript). Original manuscript readings are given at the bottom of the page, while selected variant readings (excluding purely orthographical variants) follow as a separate section. Ample editorial notes together with an extensive glossary and index of personal names add to the enjoyment of reading an already very entertaining text.

“Ele boute son doi en son con…”

Across the Middle Ages, Continental French texts satirised the French spoken by Englishmen, with particular comic value attached to their alleged tendency unwittingly to use foutre and other obscene terms. Since the Anglophones’ jargon relies on grotesque parody of attested morpho-syntactical and phonological features of Insular French, this article assesses whether there may also be a lexical kernel of truth underlying the satire by exploring the frequency and context of occurrence of specific items of sexual vocabulary in Anglo-Norman texts, including fabliaux, comic monologues and dialogues, courtly narratives, manières de langage, word-lists and glosses, legal records, and medical writing.

Britain as Sjónhverfing: Decoding the Landscape in Strengleikar

Geitarlanf is an Old Norse translation of Marie de France's lat du Chievrefoil. Only 118 lines long in the original, and covering just under one manuscript page in the Norse, the lai describes a single episode in the long and complicated story of Tristan and Isolde. Banished from the court of King Mark, Tristan hears that the queen plans to ride to Tintagel for Pentecost. He hides in the forest along the route and carves a message on a hazel branch. In the Anglo-Norman text, the exact nature of this message is unclear, (1) but the Old Norse version quotes it in full: Sva ferr med ocr kvad hann sem viduindil sa er binnz um haeslivid. Medan pessir tveir vidir bua bader saman. pa liva ok bera lauf sitt. En sa er paessa vide skildi hvarn fra odrum. pa deyr haslenn ok pui nest uidvinndillenn ok berr hvarki lauf. nema porna ok firir verdaz baede. Hin frida unnasta min. Sva ok eftir peim haetti ero vit. Ei ma ec lifa on Jain, ok ei pu on min. (Cook and Tveitane 1979, 198) (2) goes with us, he said, with the honeysuckle that fastens itself around the hazel tree. As long as these two trees are together they live and produce foliage, but if anyone should separate these trees from each other, the hazel will die and then the honeysuckle, and neither of them will produce foliage; instead, they will both dry up and perish. My beautiful sweetheart, such and in the same way are we. I cannot live without you, nor you without me. (Cook and Tveitane 1979, 199) hazel branch functions as both message and metaphor in a telescopic layering of interpretative meaning. Isolde must find, read, and decode the message inscribed upon it; the message then invites her to compare the physical object she holds to the emotional and sexual ties that bind her to Tristan. (3) As Peter Haidu writes: The stick is a natural sign of itself. sign, which normally supposes the absence of the signified, here signifies its presence (2004, 130). very wood through which Isolde rides becomes a symbol of secret communication and illicit desire. Isolde successfully interprets both message and metaphor, and the resulting meeting between the lovers gives rise to a new text, the lai itself. Geitarlauf demonstrates well the symbolic relationship between the act of traveling through the natural world and that of interpreting the written text. Indeed, this relationship is developed throughout the whole of Strengleikar, the compilation of translated Breton lais in which Geitarlauf is found. In particular, the island of Britain emerges as a key site for such explorations. It will be argued here that the Strengleikar collection demonstrates a sustained interest in the role of Britain as a setting for the romance text, and that travel through the British landscape parallels the process of reading and decoding the romance genre itself. Consisting of twenty-one prose tales, Strengleikar translates into Old Norse eleven of the lais attributed to Marie de France, as well as six anonymous French poems; a further four of the Old Norse texts have no known origin. collection is largely preserved within one manuscript, Uppsala University Library, de la Gardie 4-7. (4) manuscript dates to around the year 1270 and was likely produced in Bergen or the surrounding area. translation was reputedly commissioned by Hakon Hakonarson, king of Norway, as part of a campaign to import Continental romance texts to his country. Ruling from 1217 to 1263, Hakon developed a keen interest in the life of the Anglo-Norman court and seems to have commissioned the translation of the lais as part of a wider cultural program that included the translation of several romance texts into Norse, as well as the adoption in Norway of English styles of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Such forms of cultural exchange were supported by a mutual reliance on trade and an increasingly close relationship between political and ecclesiastical authorities (Leach 1921; Helle 1968; Kalinke 2011). …

Writing the Future: Prognostic Texts of Medieval England

Tony Hunt's vigorous campaign to publish Anglo-Norman (AN) continues with this volume, a collection of various texts predicting the future. Culturally, they fit into a long-standing tradition of various methods of determining what might happen, with the aid of an astonishing array of divinatory and prognostic instruments and practices ranging from the moon to sheep's shoulder-blades (although an AN treatise on the latter, Dean 381, is absent). Linguistically (and especially lexically), their publication makes available a range of largely unknown materials of considerable interest. The volume organizes material as follows: six prose lunaries; two verse lunaries; six zodiacal treatises; a discussion, with excerpts, of a category listed as ‘Observation of Times’; a treatment of oneiromancy with examples; three ‘books of fate’; and geomancy. There are Latin as well as Middle English texts, although AN, predictably, predominates. Roughly a third of the AN texts printed here are mentioned (and brief excerpts provided) in the same author's ‘Les Pronostics en anglo-normand’ (in Moult obscures paroles: études sur la prophétie médiévale, ed. by Richard Trachsler, Julien Abed, and David Expert (Paris: Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), pp. 29–50); and some texts supersede journal articles (Medium Ævum, 80 (2011); Romania, 128 (2010)). Curiously, one zodiacal text appears twice in the present collection (pp. 67, 187; the texts are, moreover, not altogether identical). Each chapter is followed by notes and a select glossary; the latter is (unfortunately) bereft of references to the text, so cannot be used as a means to look up interesting words, of which there are a good number. In particular, those words accompanied by question marks (but no, or a queried, gloss) would repay further exploration: arenous a. (p. 79), cf. quinte lune (p. 39); trepidonte (?) (no glossary, pp. 67, 187); auriene viande s. (p. 189); basee s. ‘lower regions’ (p. 192); angerous a. ‘(for anguisous?)’ (p. 192); treble a. ‘triple, var. trouble’ (p. 249); chertaraux s. pl. ‘error for cheminanz’ (p. 334), cf. p. 319; corperacion s. ‘assembly?’ (p. 334); petiuesce s. ‘error for petitesce (see note 62) (= p. 318 n. 1)?’: ‘AND [Anglo-Norman Dictionary] records petuesce, probably an error for petitesce’, or: read petivesce; trenchement de chemins s. ‘digging of roads’ (p. 334); esaulle s. ‘destitution, ruin, exile?’ (p. 334). This last glossary alone (to a geomantic text in British Library, MS Add. 18210) includes choruscacion s. ‘flash of light, lightning’; omaciun s. ‘homage’; pensacion s. ‘troubled thought’; uxoration s. ‘marriage’; wasion s. ‘invasion, encroachment’ — all absent from AND. Given how much the texts have to offer, it is a pity that the lexical side of the editions is not better developed. The texts are preceded by a General Introduction and followed by a useful bibliography and indexes of manuscripts, texts, and subjects.

The Anglo-Norman "Hugo de Lincolnia": A Critical Edition and Translation from the Unique Text in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 902

This edition makes available a critical text with an annotated translation of the Anglo-Norman verse narrative “Hugo de Lincolnia,” one of the Boy Crucifixion sources of the Prioress’s Tale . The Anglo-Norman text has heretofore been available in print only in a flawed nineteenth-century edition. “Hugo de Lincolnia” dates to the third quarter of the thirteenth century. It is the only extant contemporary vernacular account of the death of “Little Saint Hugh,” a Christian boy said to have been crucified by Lincoln Jews in 1255 in mockery of Christ’s Passion. In its author’s superior familiarity with the Lincoln setting, the poem supplements the better-known contemporary accounts in Latin prose by Matthew Paris and the anonymous monastic chroniclers of Burton and Waverley.

The Anglo-Norman “Hugo de Lincolnia”:

Abstract This edition makes available a critical text with an annotated translation of the Anglo-Norman verse narrative “Hugo de Lincolnia,” one of the Boy Crucifixion sources of the Prioress's Tale. The Anglo-Norman text has heretofore been available in print only in a flawed nineteenth-century edition. “Hugo de Lincolnia” dates to the third quarter of the thirteenth century. It is the only extant contemporary vernacular account of the death of “Little Saint Hugh,” a Christian boy said to have been crucified by Lincoln Jews in 1255 in mockery of Christ's Passion. In its author's superior familiarity with the Lincoln setting, the poem supplements the better-known contemporary accounts in Latin prose by Matthew Paris and the anonymous monastic chroniclers of Burton and Waverley.

Emma Lipton, Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English LiteratureAffections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature. EmmaLipton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. ix+246.

<i>Emma Lipton,</i> Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature<i>Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature</i>. EmmaLipton. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Pp. ix+246.

'Queil boen professeur, mult enseinné, queil boen collegue' Essays in Honour of Brian Merrilees / Mélanges offerts à Brian Merrilees (review)

Reviewed by: 'Queil boen professeur, mult enseinné, queil boen collegue' Essays in Honour of Brian Merrilees / Mélanges offerts à Brian Merrilees Maureen Boulton (bio) Carol J. Harvey, editor, with assistance from Margaret Burrell 'Queil boen professeur, mult enseinné, queil boen collegue' Essays in Honour of Brian Merrilees / Mélanges offerts à Brian Merrilees. Special issue, Florilegium 24 (2007). $35.00 This special issue of Florilegium, the journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists, is a splendid tribute to the long teaching career and prolific research of Brian Merrilees, recently retired from the Department of French (Victoria College) of the University of Toronto. A distinguished international group of scholars has contributed the dozen articles that make up this excellent collection, and the topics generally reflect Prof. Merrilees's interests in editing Anglo-Norman texts, and in medieval French linguistics and lexicography. The collection opens with a group of articles on literary subjects, the first two dealing with French influence in Lombardy (Jeanette Beer on the Bestiaire d'amour) and Scotland (William Calin on René d'Anjou's Livre du cuer as a source for King Hart). Glynnis Cropp's examination of the figure of Nero in medieval French literature also traces the introduction and use of the word tyran so often used to describe him. The Anglo-Norman section contains four articles exhibiting varied approaches to the subject. Perhaps the most novel is Margaret Burrell's attempt to identify the geological events and locations that might have inspired the descriptions of Hell in two twelfth-century texts (Benedeit's Voyage de Saint Brendan and Marie de France's Espurgatoire seint Patriz). Delbert Russell and Tony Hunt's contribution is a welcome edition of two previously unpublished pieces from the famous Tristan manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce d.6): the verse 'Debate of Humility and Pride' and a prose version of the 'Legend of the Holy Rood.' Pierre Nobel's painstaking comparison of the Genesis portion of the Bible anglo-normande and the Bible of Jean de Sy demonstrates that although both translators relied on a similar model, the latter also personalized his translation by relying directly on the Vulgate and by incorporating explanatory material from the Historia Scholastica. Reflecting his work as editor of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, David Trotter's article is much more abstract, examining the differences between modern and medieval approaches to semantics. The 'Bele Alis Sermon,' edited in the last article in the collection (by Robert Taylor and a group of his former students) also has Anglo-Norman links: it has been attributed to Stephen Langton and is preserved in several Insular manuscripts. [End Page 441] The articles of the last section of the collection are related to linguistics and lexicography. Reporting on a joint project of the Université d'Ottawa and the Université de Nancy, Pierre Kunstmann reports on the Dictionnaire électronique de Chrétien de Troyes: the first stage of the project was launched in 2007 (http://www.atilf.fr/dect/), and the second stage is well advanced. Anne Grondeux explores the limitations of medieval Latin glossaries as a source for semantic evolution of words. Serge Lusignan illustrates the spread of Picard dialect beyond its regional borders through the travels of the members of the D'Estrée family. In a lightervein, Giuseppedi Stefano has collected from Middle French sources a litany of burlesque saints, with the comic special powers attributed to them. This volume contains much of interest to scholars and students of medieval French language and literature, and the editions of three Anglo-Norman texts are particularly significant. With its great diversity of subjects and approaches, this collection illustrates beautifully the vitality of medieval French studies, both in Canada and abroad. It is a worthy tribute to one of Canada's outstanding scholars of medieval French. Maureen Boulton Maureen Boulton, Department of Romance Languages, University of Notre Dame Copyright © 2010 University of Toronto Press Incorporated