2007-05-10
Session 17: Relations, Companions, Derivatives
Sponsor: Early Middle English Society
This panel was my idea, sibling to Dorothy Kim’s on women and devotion. I’ll remind everyone reading that (a) this blog blocks indexing by search engines and (b) all ideas belong to their presenters, not to me—and certainly not to you.
Saint Edmund of Abingdon and Post-Canonization Vernacular Hagiography
Christopher Jensen
Defining Romance in a Changing Manuscript: The Case of Oxford, Bodleian Library MSS Douce 132 and 137
Andrea Lankin
The Shelf-Life of History: London, College of Arms MS Arundel 58 and the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester
Matthew Fisher
Jensen sketched the textual context for Edmund of Abingdon: some writers have identified him with Thomas Becket, likewise an archbishop of Canterbury, and it’s significant that most of the pertinent documents predate Edmund’s canonization. Matthew Paris’s vita, written after 1250, generally suppresses miraculous material in favor of political comments and information on Edmund’s educational background.
Matthew wrote two lives of Edmund, unusually, and the Anglo-Norman version (the fourth of Matthew’s vernacular vitae) follows the Latin one. One distinction re: Matthew’s AN life of Edmund is his denunciation of the papal legate, Odo, which may be a sentiment best expressed in a non-Latin text (going with the idea that Latin is an official language, the appropriate mode for the church, etc.). Contra M. T. Clanchy’s comments on books of hours, here the non-Latinity of Matthew’s AN life is foregrounded. [One might ask whether anti-papal is necessarily anti-Latin, since Latin’s also associated with clerics, but I forgot to do so after the talk.] Jensen noted also the dedication to Isabel of Provence, which says AN is more read amongst the laity, clerics, and gentry—the linguistic choice of AN thus favors pragmatism over textual authority.
Jensen turned hence to the South English Legendary, a collection of vitae that began appearing a couple of decades after Matthew’s work. Both the important manuscripts Laud Misc. 108 and Harley 2277 include a life of Edmund. Whereas Matthew politicized Edmund’s (actual) life, in SEL vitae are flattened with respect to chronology; the lineage of saints (see also Becket) that Matthew sought to construct cannot occur in SEL. [Then I wrote “Becket ep[isode] m[o]v[emen]t amongst versions of Edm[und]” but no longer have a clue why it matters.] Unlike their predecessors, the post-Conquest [i.e., post-1066] “novi sancti” could be historicized specifically, yet in SEL they’re not.
Jensen concluded with reference to the historicized position of St Erkenwald in Harley 2250, site of mediation between a Christian and a virtuous but chronologically disenfranchised pagan, as a striking example of intercession.
Lankin’s paper focused upon Douce 137 and 132 to examine “romance” as a generic and linguistic term. She argued that the codices were originally five booklets, bound together during the later thirteenth century and annotated somewhat, then separated by Francis Douce during the nineteenth.
I wrote relatively little and am reluctant to share the handout’s contents, but Lankin disputed the sense of romance-as-genre that draws upon ideals rather than the materials we have (Strohm and M. Evans for her, rather than Heng); she commented on the appeal to rumanz (-as-language) in texts’ prologues as a trope of accessibility, particularly when Anglo-Norman texts appear with Latin ones in the same codex, i.e., when Latin is presumably comprehensible to any reader interacting with that codex. With Douce MSS 137 and 132 Lankin commented upon a late thirteenth-century annotator’s distinction between texts “romanum” [sic] and texts “in lingua gallica.”
Fisher began with a clever description of a quarto-sized volume, much emended and altered within, which turned out to be W. A. Wright’s 1887 Rolls Series edition of the chronicle associated with Robert of Gloucester. The talk prompted our reevaluation of how colophons are construed (the bit of a text, rarely present, that declares where, when, and/or by whom it was written): often colophons are copied along with their texts, such that something might claim to have been written down two centuries earlier than other indicators, such as script type, could support. In College of Arms MS Arundel 58, a colophon binds a text of RGlou’s chronicle to 1448 and uses unusually technical terms (theological, grammatical, medical). Fisher suggested that some of the terms might indicate Lydgate or Lydgatian interest, which has interesting implications for the text that concludes Arundel 58. That text is a set of verses on the kings of England, ed. Mooney in Viator, which is related to (but not the same as) Lydgate’s verses [ed. McCracken, IIRC]. Returning to the colophon— it uses the word “limned” to indicate the full-page drawings that occur in the codex, and includes the word “pettigrew,” which might be a Lydgatian coinage.
[slight hop here, since my notes hiccup] In Arundel 58 the RGlou text is essentially a copy for its first 76 folios, but on f. 76 the mise-en-page changes, such that half the page is in one column across, the other half in double columns; the single column is a prose interpolation derived primarily from John of Glastonbury’s chronicle, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie, and the Mandeville version of the prose Brut—all texts that the RGlou text did not or could not use. [John of Glast. and the prose Brut postdate RGlou.] Though one tends to think of Geoffrey’s Historia as popular, period, due to its many extant manuscript texts, Fisher reminded us that this sort of reception [three centuries later] qualifies as well: the Arundel compiler had a text of Geoffrey before him with which to emend the RGlou text.