Vie De Saint Research Articles

Relational Virginity and Nonbinary Gender: La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis

ABSTRACT “Virgins,” to quote Sarah Salih, “are good to think with.” This holds true for medieval saints and twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics alike. Scholars of medieval gender have demonstrated that virginity functioned as a sexuality, a form of devotion, and even a gender unto itself in the Middle Ages. In that spirit, and drawing on recent work in transfeminist studies, this article proposes virginity as a form of nonbinary gender—as opposed to femininity, androgyny, or third gender, as it has previously been understood—in Old French hagiography. Works like La vie de sainte Euphrosine and La vie de saint Alexis ask us to account for virginity’s relationality and its embrace of contingency, a convergence that transfeminist medieval and virginity studies can together provide. Virginity as nonbinary gender, in turn, points to the relationality of all gender, to the inherent disorganization and enmeshment of gender itself.

A Lost Copy of the Old French Vie (or Chanson) de Saint Alexis (Alexandrine Quatrain Version)

The Municipal Library of Tournai was struck in an air raid during the Second World War. Among the valuable manuscripts that were lost was Bibliothèque de la ville de Tournai MS 129, a fragmentary manuscript containing the alexandrine quatrain version of the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis. This poem, also known as the Chanson de Saint Alexis, represents one of the oldest surviving poetic traditions in French and enjoyed considerable popularity during the centuries after it was produced. Despite considerable scholarship on the Vie de Saint Alexis, the Tournai MS has gone largely unnoticed and is not mentioned in editions of the decasyllabic version of the Vie, nor is it mentioned in the only edition of the quatrain version. Thankfully, a nineteenth-century transcription of the lost Tournai copy survived the war. This article compares this transcription to surviving versions of the Vie de Saint Alexis to explore how the lost Tournai text intersects with, and illuminates, the broader tradition of the poem.

Vie de Saint Alexis : the elements of the antique novel live on in a holy life

One of the most well-known legends of the Middle Ages, the life of Saint Alexius, has been immortalized in both Latin and French poetry. The story, known from Latin and French sources, has been combined from several previous versions into a single legend over long centuries. My essay analyses the earliest Old French version of Saint Alexius's story, showing how a relatively dryly written sacred life can transform into a narrative enriched by romantic turns and emotional lyrical inserts.

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

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...

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.

Кралят, кръстоносецът и човекът Луи IX според Жоанвил – ценности и емоции

In Jean de Joinville’s text Vie de Saint Louis around King Louis IX’s personality several emotional communities are formed. The most important of them unifies the crusaders of the Seventh Crusade in Egypt. The values in that emotional community are related to King Louis IX’s qualities. Some smaller emotional communities are formed around the king including mainly his interlocutors. The dialogs with the king mentioned in the text and Louis IX’s exploits described by Joinville illustrate the qualities as well as the emotions of the king-crusader as a human and a saint. The personality of Louis IX possesses according to Joinville’s text specific emotionality different from the traditional stereotypes.

Jean de Joinville and the Old French rhotic consonant

Abstract Based on textual evidence from Jean de Joinville’s Vie de saint Louis, this article argues that the Old French rhotic consonant /r/ had a dorsal pronunciation for at least some groups of medieval Francophones. This argument counters the prevailing view that medieval French /r/ was uniformly apical, and that the now-standard dorsal pronunciation only emerged in the early modern period. The article then develops the hypothesis that dorsal /r/ came into Old French as a result of Germanic influence, and not as a spontaneous development. For this purpose, it first surveys the current state of the debate about the origins of dorsal /r/ in the Germanic languages and evaluates the merits of its principal arguments in the light of Joinville’s testimony. The article then advances a sociolinguistic argument in favor of the Germanic-origins hypothesis. Using the available evidence for the interactions between Germanic- and Romance-speakers at the dawn of the written French language, it proposes that Carolingian-era nobles who were native speakers of Franconian dialects brought this pronunciation of /r/ into Old French, and that this sound subsequently persisted in some Old French aristocratic speech as part of a prestige accent.

Reinventing Saint Francis: Józef Wittlin, Anti-Semitism and the Idea of Modern Sainthood

This article discusses Jozef Wittlin’s literary exploration of the idea of modern sainthood. It argues that Wittlin’s search for a new model of saintly life that would respond to the modern age was informed by the ongoing theological debates about the meaning and value of traditional hagiography. The article demonstrates that Wittlin’s reflections were inspired by Paul Sabatier’s influential study Vie de saint Francois d’Assise (Life of Saint Francis of Assisi), and informed by the immediate socio-political context (the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-19 and the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe). Ultimately, Wittlin’s writings reinvent Saint Francis as a modern-day saint who shows a radical empathy with the persecuted and the marginalised, above all the Jews. Responding to growing anti-Semitism that was endorsed by a number of nationalist and Roman Catholic groups, Wittlin reimagines Saint Francis as a social activist who gives active attention to the suffering of the vilified ‘other’ who has been rejected by mainstream society.

The Spirit Moves: Mobility and Saintliness in the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis

The Spirit Moves: Mobility and Saintliness in the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis

In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages by Shirin A. Khanmohamadi (review)

Reviewed by: In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages by Shirin A. Khanmohamadi Jason Stoessel Khanmohamadi, Shirin A., In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014; cloth; pp. 216; 1 b/w illustration; R.R.P. US$47.50, £31.00; ISBN 9780812245622. Shirin A. Khanmohamodi’s first book is a major reworking of her PhD dissertation (Columbia University, 2005). The book improves upon her dissertation, notably in the omission of a slightly awkward chapter on Marie de France’s Lais in favour of a new chapter on Jean de Joinville’s La vie de Saint Louis. The result is a tighter series of reworked essays that also examine the Descriptio Kambriae of Gerard of Wales, the Iterarium of William of Rubruck, and the Travels of John of Mandeville, thus focusing on a genre of medieval writing from the end of the twelfth up to the mid-fourteenth century that some still refer to as ‘travel literature’. The inclusion of Rubruck nonetheless uncomfortably expands the book into realms that cry out for consideration of other authors like the extraordinary Odoric of Pordenone or John of Montecorvino, but such gaps have been recently and admirably filled, for example, by Kim M. Phillips’s Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Khanmohamadi adopts a recent critical position, styling these examples of medieval travel literature as ‘medieval ethnography’, which she also classes as a genre of anthropological writing. She is not alone in doing so, joined by notables like Robert Bartlett and Joan-Pau Rubiés. Some readers might object, however, to her rudimentary definitions of ethnography as ‘discourse on observed manners and customs’, and anthropology as ‘the set of ideas and theories attempting to account for cultural diversity of the unity of the “human”’ (p. 11). Whether medieval theologies, cosmologies, and other systems of thought (especially experiential scholasticism in the mode of Roger Bacon) can be subsumed into a theory of discourses is beside the point: the modern terms ‘ethnography’ and ‘anthropology’ evoke a teleology [End Page 317] that risks refashioning the past in the image of the present. While all history tends in this direction, these sorts of terminological impasses thwart the historiographical dialogue of the past and present. In this same vein, there is a strongly secularising thread running through Khanmohamadi’s book. Khanmohamadi overplays the influence of ‘pagan’ classical literature upon late medieval travel literature while conversely ignoring the thread of scholastic theology in the writings of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Perhaps the most notable omission is St Augustine, who was well known for his position in his City of God that even monsters were God’s people. Similar theological views permeate the thinking of Roger Bacon. It is difficult to understand Khanmohamadi’s reasons for adopting such an approach, but the results are sometimes problematic, as, for example, in the chapter on William of Rubruck’s account of his travels to the Mongol Khan. Saliently, she emphasises the place of self-reflection and self-visualisation in the mendicant art of preaching. Aron Gurevich has already noted how this practice had transformed preaching in European contexts. It permits Khanmohamadi to identify several instances of conscious self-representation and reflective engagement with Mongol hosts in William’s account. Yet, one cannot help noting that it is William writing about William in his Iterarium: sometimes more critical space needed to be placed between what William portrayed and the reality of a man that was initially seen as an odd ascetic who, for example, to the amusement of his Mongol hosts, chose not to wear shoes in the biting frost and, as A. J. Watson pointed out in the Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011), did not understand Mongol gift culture. For Franciscans like William, the exemplary life of their founder, especially his travelling to Egypt to preach before the Sultan, provided a model for the order’s interaction with the world’s peoples. Franciscans like Ramon Lull recognised the centrality of language in this experience, although this is one of the weakest aspects...

Constructions en changement: hommage à Paul Hirschbühler ed. by Monique Dufresne

Dufresne, Monique, éd. Constructions en changement: hommage à Paul Hirschbühler. Québec: PU de Laval, 2012. ISBN 978-2-7637-8936-1. Pp. 209. $30 Can. This volume serves a dual purpose: to present four papers on French historical grammar from the ongoing corpus and research project Modéliser le changement: les voies du français (Martineau and others), and to honor Hirschbühler—himself a participant in the project—on his retirement. Dufresne opens the volume with a heartfelt dedication and an introduction. The first paper, by Alexandra Simonenko and Hirschbühler, exemplifies Hirschbühler’s characteristically detailed consideration of new data and careful attention to the previous literature. The authors analyze fifteen thousand examples of proclisis and enclisis of object pronouns in verb-initial clauses, examining four clause types over five centuries. They meticulously compare two previous analyses against the new data, concluding convincingly that Labelle and Hirschbühler’s 2005 account of functional-projection loss over time for some subtypes is superior to Rouveret’s 2004 analysis, in which the number of projections generally increases. The second paper (Dufresne and Fernande Dupuis) lays to rest the traditional assumption that the choice of auxiliary with verbs of motion and change-of-state in Old French was random. Rather, activities viewed as telic require BE in Old French, while atelic activities require HAVE. In this first large-scale investigation of unaccusativity in the history of French, over two thousand clauses (twelfth through sixteenth century) with verbs identified as syntactically unaccusative are examined. Although the preliminary character of some of the data on postverbal subjects (for example, incomplete labeling or discussion of some of the graphs) makes parts of the theoretical analysis difficult to evaluate, many fascinating questions for continuing research are raised. In the third of these admirably data-intensive studies, Christiane Marchello-Nizia and Magali Rouquier provide an extensive description of the order and expression of subjects and objects in two complete very early texts, the Passion de Clermont and the Vie de Saint Alexis. Adding these texts to two previously examined later texts, the authors obtain a more precise picture of the evolution of medieval French syntax. Object-verb order loses ground between the two early texts; there is a continual, intriguing preference for expressing either the subject or the object, but not both. (A question: Are verb-object versus object-verb orders for nonfinite verbs treated separately or not?) The final paper presents a follow-up by Lene Schøsler on her previous work with semantically bleached verbs such as faire or prendre and their nominal objects. She establishes tests for distinguishing such constructions, containing a fixed number and type of complements and modification relationships, from syntactically free verb phrases, maintaining that they represent a sub-type of grammaticalization . Overall, for those interested in French and Romance syntax and the lexicon, this volume will provoke new insights into the relevance of diachronic corpus studies to issues of more general concern. Indiana University, Bloomington Barbara Vance 228 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 ...

Une “Vie de saint Jean-Baptiste” en vers du xve siècle. Introduction et édition

The Vie de saint Jean-Baptiste published here was probably composed in the second half of the 15th century; set up in quatrains of octosyllabes, its content includes the main episodes of the Saint’s life: birth, life in the desert, arrest and martyrdom; curiously, the baptism of Jesus is lacking. In spite of its very mediocre literary quality, this poem became a success of library: from Lyon to Rouen to Paris (by Trepperel), it had at least eleven editions, among them some incunabula.

The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Letters and Prayers. The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Rules. Testament and Admonitions. The Writings of Clare of Assisi: Letters, Form of Life, Testament and Blessing ed. by Michael W. Blastic, O.F.M.; Jay M. Hammond; and J. A. Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M (review)

Reviewed by: The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Letters and Prayers. The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Rules. Testament and Admonitions. The Writings of Clare of Assisi: Letters, Form of Life, Testament and Blessing ed. by Michael W. Blastic, O.F.M.; Jay M. Hammond; and J. A. Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M David Flood O.F.M. The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Letters and Prayers. The Writings of Francis of Assisi: Rules. Testament and Admonitions. The Writings of Clare of Assisi: Letters, Form of Life, Testament and Blessing. Edited by Michael W. Blastic; Jay M. Hammond; and J. A. Wayne Hellmann, O.F.M. Conv. [Studies in Early Franciscan Sources, Vols. 1–3.] (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications. 2011. Vol. 1: Pp. xix, 335; vol. 2: xvi, 330; vol. 3: xvii, 147. Vol. 1: $29.95 paperback, ISBN 978-1-57659-230-4; vol. 2: $29.95 paperback, ISBN 978-1-57659-232-8; vol. 3: $19.95 paperback, ISBN 978-1-57659-233-5.) This review covers three volumes that contain studies on “Early Franciscan Sources.” The first two address “The Writings of Francis of Assisi,” the third “The Writings of Clare of Assisi.” The studies follow on the publication of the volumes (Francis of Assisi: Early Documents I–III, 1999–2001) that have put these writings, as well as historical material of interest to the study of these writings, into English. The three volumes under review aspire to help the readers of the writings of Ss. Francis and Clare understand them historically. These studies are marked by Paul Sabatier’s life of Francis of Assisi (La Vie de Saint François d’Assise, Paris, 1894). Sabatier used the narrative literature on Francis. His selection of stories touched off a search for further stories and a discussion about which individuals could be believed (the so-called Franciscan Question). Since then, the focus has remained on Francis. Historically Francis belonged to a brotherhood. He is part of a story. A biography might work if the subject has not given rise to an organization that engages with its age, as did Francis and his companions. The studies under review, in general, have not shaken off the interpretive cast given Franciscan history by Sabatier. The whole project, the translated sources and these studies, deals with Francis as saint, prophet, and founder and not with the movement to which he belonged. Francis was, first of all, a brother. The editors have seen to it that each piece of writing by Francis and by Clare received careful attention. Ten contributors examined the manuscript evidence for a piece and its context, then interpreted the text and did its bibliography. Understandably, a piece’s treatment varied in length, for some texts are brief and simple; others long and much involved in the history of the brothers and sisters. In the first of the three volumes, Letters and Prayers, Michael Cusato goes over “The Letters to the Faithful” at great length (149–207) and deservedly so, given the length of the text and its historical importance. In the second volume, Rules, Testament and Admonitions, William Short probes carefully the many details of the rules and, in particular, those of the Early Rule and the Later Rule (17–222). They are, along with the Testament, the pieces most important for the history of the brotherhood. At the same time, in much fewer pages (Letters and Prayers, 209–44), Jay M. Hammond sees to it that the “Vernacular Prayers” of Francis are far from neglected. The slender volume on Clare’s writings, not as often visited by historians, is especially helpful as survey and introduction. The authors take care of [End Page 124] the differences of opinion that might arise around their texts by offering readers good bibliographies. And so the writings of Francis and Clare are open for study. The texts still have to be lifted into a study of the early Franciscan years marked by chapter VI of the Rule. The chapter does not praise the times in which the brothers and sisters of the Franciscan association lived. David Flood O.F.M. The Franciscan Institute St. Bonaventure University Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University...

“Et sachiez qu’il se repenti fort quant yl y envoia” (Jean de Joinville, Vie de saint Louis). Par-delà la désillusion mongole. Mœurs et légendes “tartares” au temps du roi Saint Louis

The passage that John of Joinville, faithful companion of Louis IX, devotes to the Mongols in his chronicle of the Seventh Crusade, known as “La Vie de Saint Louis”, cross-conceives two structures under the sign of hope: historical facts and legends on the one hand, and Christian sensibilities on the other, giving way to a set of “ethnological” observations about what are presented as “barbarian” customs. The text gives a faithful reflection on sentiments which agitated the Crusaders and their King: hope and disillusion. But Joinville's testimony goes far beyond that: it is first and foremost a testimony of love upon which history could be re-written.

Casting a “Sideways Glance” at the Crusades: The Voice of the Other in Joinville's Vie de Saint Louis

This article finds in Joinville's late crusading narrative, the Vie de Saint Louis, evidence of past and continuing dialogues and a community of understanding between putative enemies in a theater of war. I argue that the text's mutually derived, Franco-Islamic references and syncretic customs attest to the everyday cross-fertilization and dialogue that took place in the medieval contact zone of Outre-mer irrespective of official crusading ideology emerging from Europe. I then turn to examining closely some of the Vie's many inter-confessional dialogues, showing how the cited Muslim voices of these dialogues reorient meaning within their linguistic environment, casting what Bakhtin called an unofficial “sideways glance” upon what would otherwise be monologic, Latin-Christian discourse. These unofficial, textual sideways glances both open up alternative perspectives within the Vie, and effectively cast an alternative image of the crusading endeavor itself, one in which Muslim and Christian values are mirrored in each other.

Text Editing: Past, Present, and Future

As I've been thinking about Romanic Review's 100th anniversary, I was tempted, as I gather many participants on the program were, to dip into some of the first issues of the journal in order to take a look at the sorts of articles being published in 1910 and the few years following. Among other observations, it is intriguing for us to discover the preponderance of studies devoted to either linguistics or philological topics as well as, historically speaking, to medieval and Renaissance literature. Only a handful of articles over the first ten years extend into the seventeenth century and beyond. This of course reflects the nature of graduate training at the time as well as the individuals who were forming graduate students and future professors at the most prominent institutions of higher education: Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and a handful of others. Among the medieval contributions, I was struck by the slight number of studies devoted to editions of shorter texts--at the time, a more common type of contribution to the French journal Romania--or to editorial questions in general, which seem to have been relegated to the review section. My attention was thus drawn, for rather different reasons, to two items in volume 1, dated 1910. first was a review of an article that had been published the previous year, in July 1909, in the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences. Written by an assistant professor of Spanish at Yale named Frederick Bliss Luquiens, the article under review had the straightforward yet provocative title The Reconstruction of the Original Chanson de Roland. (1) reviewer, J. A. Will, summarily dismissed the young professor's argument, accusing him of subjectivity and specious reasoning. second item in that first volume of Romanic Review that attracted my attention appeared in the second fascicle for 1910, an article by the distinguished French medievalist Joseph Bedier, innocuously entitled de Normandie dans les chansons de geste. (2) author's name is printed at the end, followed by the date, December 22, 1909, and the place, New York City. There would at first blush seem to be little affinity between the Yale professor arguing somewhat loosely in favor of the technical excellence of the Oxford manuscript as a way of approaching a satisfactory reconstruction of the archetype of the Roland and Bedier's own work at the time, which concentrated on analyses of the epic tradition that would lead to the publication of his four-volume Legendes epiques, the first two volumes of which had appeared in 1908 and the final two of which would be published in 1912 and 1913. Romanic Review article, which was later incorporated into the Legendes epiques, as were many of his articles devoted to epic at that time, studied the anachronistic presence of Richard the First, duke of Normandy, in a number of chansons de geste related to the cycle of Charlemagne in order to add one more piece of evidence in support of his thesis concerning the learned and clerical origins of French epic, which defied the prevailing orthodoxy of popular origins. Before coming back to a possible relation between these two items in the first volume of Romanic Review, a few words should be said about the importance of the period between 1907 and 1913 for editorial work in France and Germany, the status of the Chanson de Roland as an exemplary editorial challenge, and Joseph Bedier's career-long contributions to the theory and practice of text editing. As is well known, Gaston Paris, through his courses and his landmark publication of the Vie de Saint Alexis in 1872, had introduced a method of text editing developed in Germany that was perceived as more scientific than the less systematic approaches of his predecessors. method, commonly associated with the German textual scholar Karl Lachmann, attempts to establish the interrelationships between and among extant manuscripts of a given work in order to show how they relate to the now-lost common archetype, itself a descendant of the authorial original. …

The Missing Sister : Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont’s Life of Isabelle of France

Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-1698) wrote a short life of Isabelle of France as part of his larger Vie de saint Louis. This life of Isabelle, however, was silently left out when J. de Gaulle edited the latter work for the first time in 1847-51. This article edits the text for the first time while placing it in the context of Tillemont’s larger oeuvre and providing new insights into Tillemont’s working method, the composition of the Vie de saint Louis, and the choices made by J. de Gaulle. The study of Isabelle was an integral part of Tillemont’s work on Louis IX but slipped through the cracks of de Gaulle’s edition. Attention to this work will benefit both scholars of both thirteenth-century sanctity and early modern erudition.

The great crusader hero

Joinville’s Vie de Saint Louis is, in the least, a touching account of a hard campaign in the East, and the humanity and sanctity of a king. There are countless ways in which the reader can be touched, though, from excitement at battle descriptions, tenderness at the goodness of King Louis IX, or annoyance prompted by the imposing presence of the narrator himself. This essay seeks to study the author’s relation to the ideals of chivalry as exposed in Joinville’s work, and try to understand, if possible, who is the real hero in the Vie de Saint Louis.

Frede Jensen, The Language of the Eleventh-Century «Vie de Saint Alexis». A Philological Commentary

Article Frede Jensen, The Language of the Eleventh-Century «Vie de Saint Alexis». A Philological Commentary was published on December 1, 2007 in the journal Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (volume 123, issue 4).

A Companion to Wace

This Companion is an in-depth survey of all the writings attributed to the poet Wace today. Part i treats Wace the hagiographer in his three religious poems, La Vie de sainte Marguerite, La Conception Nostre Dame, and La Vie de saint Nicolas. Parts ii and iii turn, in succession, to his more historical works, Le Roman de Brut and Le Roman de Rou. The Introduction examines what we know about Wace's life and times. A brief Conclusion summarizes the major characteristics of Wace's œuvre. Each part adheres to a similar plan to survey each of the five works, with some adaptations required by the distinctiveness of the individual text. As Le Saux states in the introduction to the religious poems, treating the poems in succession, she provides ‘an outline of the manuscript tradition of each text, analyzing the way their sources have been approached and adapted, and exploring the agenda underlying the poet's interpretation of his material’. This three-part arrangement is followed in treating the Brut and Rou, although Le Saux emphasizes the lengthier parts of each work, thus according less attention to narrative segments that Wace treats more briefly. For example, Arthur, not Brutus, and William the Conqueror, not the Northmen, loom large in her interpretations. This is not necessarily a fault in a ‘companion’; however, the reader should be aware of where emphasis lies and what receives less attention. The comparison with the sources and analogues offers useful support to Le Saux's interpretations. It is unfortunate that Benoît de Sainte-Maure receives relatively short shrift. Both vernacular ‘historians’ treat, in two separate works, analogous ‘histories’. Without undue lengthening, it would have been interesting to hear more about how Benoît used Dares and Dictys compared to how Wace used Geoffrey of Monmouth or his Variant Version, as well as how Wace dealt with sources in the Rou that Benoît used again in the Chronique. None the less, the Companion to Wace is an important contribution to Wace studies, both for students approaching the author for the first time and for specialist scholars interested in new interpretations and a new overview of his writings. There is a select, albeit lengthy, bibliography and a very helpful index.