Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text (Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces) 9782503546636, 2503546633

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Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces Volume 8 Editorial Board under the auspices of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Hull General Editor Lesley A. Coote, University of Hull Editorial Board Megan Cavell, University of Birmingham Catherine Emerson, National University of Ireland, Galway Ildar H. Garipzanov, Universitetet i Oslo Adrian P. Tudor, University of Hull Colin Veach, University of Hull Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

by Olivia Robinson

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

© 2020, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2020/0095/67 ISBN 978-2-503-54663-6 eISBN 978-2-503-56092-2 DOI 10.1484/M.MISCS-EB.5.106933 ISSN 2565-8654 eISSN 2565-974X Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 7 Abbreviations 9 Colour Plates

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Chapter 1. Introduction Chaucerian Meanings

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Chapter 2. Contesting the Roman de la rose 33 Debating the Rose in England: An English Readership for the Rose and the Querelle? 34 Commentary through Rewriting: The Bi-authored Rose 36 Debating the Rose: The Querelle du Roman de la rose 41 The Contested Querelle: Self-Promotion and Bibliographic Presentation 46 Chapter 3. Translating the Rose 55 The Fragmented Romaunt 58 ‘Grant translateur’: Chaucer as Rose Translator? 70 The Romaunt in Manuscript: MS G 78 Translating the Rose’s Textual Traditions 79 Translators’ Interpolations in the Romaunt 83 ‘Gaps’ in the Romaunt and the B-Text of the Rose 90 The Decorative Features of MS G 93 Running Headers in MS G 96 Rubrication in MS G 97 Initials and Borders 103 The Romaunt and Chaucer: Two Intertextual Connections 108 Chapter 4. Chartier’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy and its Querelle 113 Defining the ‘Culture of Debate’: The Querelle 115 The First Cycle 116 The Belle dame and the Excusacion: Chartier’s Provocative Lady 118 The Second Cycle 124 The Influence of the Querelle 127

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Chapter 5. Richard Roos’s Middle English Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Contribution to the Querelle? 133 The Prologue to the Belle Dame and the Excusacion 140 The Belle Dame as ‘Chaucerian’ Poem: Using Chaucer Intertextually 149 Roos’s Envoy 150 ‘Trouthe’ in Love and Translation 151 ‘My verray lode-sterre’: The Belle Dame and Criseyde 156 The Trace of the Belle Dame: Challenging Literary Authority 163 The Belle Dame in Manuscript 166 Rethinking the Chaucerian Codex: Longleat 258 167 Chapter 6. An ABC to the Virgin 175 The Pèlerinage as Contested Text 177 Chaucer’s Translation 183 English Translations of Vie 1 and Vie 2 and Chaucer’s Place within Them 185 Vie 2 Verse Translation 189 Bibliography 199 Index 221

Acknowledgements

Sections of Chapters 1, 3, and 5 have appeared in a slightly different form in Olivia Robinson, ‘Creation or Replication? Rethinking Creativity in Late Medieval FrancoEnglish Translation’, in Medieval Theories of the Creative Act, ed. by Elisabeth Dutton and Martin Röhde (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2017), pp. 131–46 and Olivia Robinson, ‘Recontextualising the Romaunt of the Rose: Glasgow, MS Hunter 409 and the Roman de la Rose’, English, 64 (2015), 27–41. I thank Lesley Coote, Catherine Emerson, and Rosie Bonté, the Brepols editorial team who helped me bring this book to fruition with such patience and care, alongside the peer reviewer, whose suggestions for improvement were invaluable. Part of the research forming the basis of this book was funded by a doctoral award from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, and by a series of research support grants from St Hilda’s College, Oxford. I am very grateful indeed for the financial support of both these organizations, particularly St Hilda’s, whose Middle Common Room housed such a supportive and inspiring community of women during my years as a postgraduate there. I also thank the librarians and staff at all of the libraries in which I have worked, particularly the Bodleian Library, the Taylorian Library, the Oxford English Faculty Library, St Hilda’s College Library, Lambeth Palace Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire de Fribourg. The publication of the images in this study was generously funded by the Institut d’Etudes Médiévales at the University of Fribourg. This project started as a doctoral thesis supervised by Helen Barr and Helen Swift, and I remain profoundly grateful to them both for their excellent and stimulating co-supervision. I also owe sincere thanks to many friends and colleagues who have generously discussed aspects of this work with me, in particular Diane Alff, Rob Avis, Hannah Bailey, Jeanette Beer, Jane Bliss, Ardis Butterfield, Emma Cayley, Elisabeth Dutton, Graham Robert Edwards, James Freeman, Jóhanna Friðriksdóttir, Malcolm Godden, Erin Goeres, Jane Griffiths, Ralph Hanna III, Nadia Hilliard, Simon Horobin, Holly James-Maddocks, Phillipe Maupeu, Joan E. McRae, Jonathan Morton, Jenni Nuttall, Aditi Nafde, Mariana Neilly, Jean-Pascal Pouzet, and Daniel Wakelin. I am especially grateful to Helen Brookman, who has been an inspirational research collaborator over the past few years, and has offered encouragement, advice, and doses of common sense at crucial moments during the writing of this book: thank you. I owe particular and heartfelt thanks to Joan E. McRae and Graham Robert Edwards, who sent me emergency copies of published material to enable me to check my citations at proof stage, when my own copies were unavailable to me during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown. Tom Lockwood, Fiona Gilyead, and Hugh Adlington also helped me through the final stages of completing this project in these

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challenging circumstances: I am extremely grateful to them all. My parents and my sister have supported and encouraged me throughout, as have Heather Gagen, Fran Milsom, and Matthew Roper: all of them probably now know more than they ever thought possible or desirable about medieval literature. I am also grateful to Fran, to Ugo Haberman, and to Claire Girard and Fred Nodin for giving me house-room in France while I worked in libraries there. I began writing this book as a lecturer at Brasenose College, Oxford, and finished it as a research fellow at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. I am more grateful than I can express to my cohorts of English students at Brasenose and Corpus Christi Colleges in Oxford, and to my current undergraduates at Birmingham, for their enthusiasm, intellectual excitement, and insightful questions. I also thank my colleagues, both old and new, especially Sos Eltis, Jennifer Johnson, and Emily Wingfield for their unceasing encouragement; Simon Palfrey for asking me frequently when my book was coming out; and my co-researchers on the Medieval Convent Drama Project, Aurélie Blanc and Matthew Cheung-Salisbury, for their good humour and collegiality. Elisabeth Dutton, once my undergraduate tutor, has become a highly valued mentor, collaborator, and friend: I would not have completed this book without her thoughtfulness and support. My greatest debt is to Daniel Thomas, who has read, considered, and discussed my ideas with characteristic generosity and precision from first to last. I could not have written it without him: this book is for Daniel, with my love.

Abbreviations

ABC a.b.c.

AND Belle dame 

Belle Dame BL BnF CMEPV DIMEV

DMF

MED OED1 OED2 OED3 Riverside STC 

Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘An ABC to the Virgin’, cited from Riverside (below) Guillaume de Deguileville, alphabetic prayer to the Virgin Mary from Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine. Cited from Le Livre du Pèlerin de vie humaine (1355), ed. and trans. by Graham Robert Edwards and Phillipe Maupeu (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2015) The Anglo-Norman Dictionary (University of Aberystwyth) [accessed 1 December 2019] Alain Chartier, La Belle dame sans mercy, in Alain Chartier, Baudet Herenc, and Achille Caulier, Le Cycle de la ‘Belle dame sans mercy’: une anthologie poétique du XVe siècle (BNF MS Fr. 1131, bilingual edition ed., trans., and annotated by David Hult and Joan E. McRae (Paris: Champion, 2003) Richard Roos, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, in Chaucerian Dream-Visions and Complaints, ed. by Dana Symons (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2004) London, British Library Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (University of Michigan, 2001) [accessed 1 December 2019] The Digital Index of Middle English Verse, Based on the Index of Middle English Verse (1943) and its Supplement (1965), compiled by Linne R. Mooney, Dan W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova, with Deborah Thorpe and David Hill Radcliffe [accessed 1 December 2019] Le Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1100–1500), version 2015 (DMF 2015). ATILF - CNRS & Université de Lorraine [accessed 1 December 2019] The Middle English Dictionary (University of Michigan, 2001) [accessed 1 December 2019] The Oxford English Dictionary, 1st edn (1889). Online version: [accessed 1 December 2019] The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (1989). Online version: [accessed 1 December 2019] The Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (2000–). Online version: [accessed 1 December 2019] The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Pollard, Alfred W., and G. R. Redgrave, A Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. 2nd edn rev. and enl. begun by William A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katharine F. Pantzer (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91)

Colour Plates

Plate 1. The Romaunt of the Rose, Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 409, fol. 91r, detail. By permission of the University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

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Plate 2. Le Roman de la rose, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Smith Lesouëf 62, fol. 30r, detail. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Smith Lesouëf 62.

Plate 3. Le Roman de la rose, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5014D, fol. 30v, detail. By permission of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/The National Library of Wales.

co lo u r plat e s

Plate 4. Le Roman de la rose, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Selden Supra 57, fol. 30r, detail. Reproduced with permission.

Plate 5. Le Roman de la rose, detail. © Bibliothèque municipale de Chalon-sur-Saône, MS 33, fol. 1r. Travail effectué par la Bibliothèque municipale de Chalon-sur-Saône. Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, s.xiv

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Plate 6. London, BL, MS Harley 4826, fol. 1*r. © The British Library Board, MS Harley 4826.

Chapter 1

Introduction

This book draws together three different strands of investigation into late medieval textual production and reception in France and England. Firstly, it deals with verse translation from French into English in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Secondly, it deals with literary querelles — that is to say, the content, form(s), and transmission of contemporary written debates about particular literary texts.1 Thirdly, it considers the ways in which the boundaries of the Chaucer canon have been established and defined by the inclusion and exclusion of particular works. It takes as its subject two Middle English texts situated on the fringes of that canon: The Romaunt of the Rose,2 and The Belle Dame Sans Mercy.3 These texts, as is well known, are translations of particular French sources: respectively Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la rose,4 and Alain Chartier’s La Belle dame sans mercy.5 Both French texts sparked particular kinds of debate or interpretative contest amongst their readers, and the first major argument of this book is that their Middle English translators and transmitters were aware of these debates, and participated in them through their acts of translation and textual transmission. This is a participation which, I suggest, has gone largely unremarked. Both translations have suffered from negative critical judgements in recent years, which have often centred on the approaches to translation which they appear to manifest. Most critics have seen in them attempts to carbon-copy their French sources as closely as possible, often with a rather low degree of artistic success, and the response to this approach — if, indeed, it is an adequate description of what these translations do — has been largely negative. Take, for example, W. W. Skeat’s 1897 comments

1 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, esp. chaps 1 and 2 gives an excellent analysis of the medieval antecedents and development of the querelle as a genre, and an introduction to the Querelle du Roman de la rose and the Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy, the two Querelles with which I engage in particular detail in this book. 2 Trans.? (usually attributed in part to Chaucer), ?1360s (but this dating rests on attribution to Chaucer, early in his career), Romaunt/Roman, ed. (from earliest printed witness, with parallel Rose-text in French) by Sutherland and, for an alternative text (edited from the principal manuscript witness) Riverside, pp. 685–767. I cite from both editions and from the manuscript in the course of this book; all citations are, therefore, referenced individually. 3 Trans. Richard Roos, probably c. 1430s–40s, in Chaucerian Dream-Visions, ed. by Symons; all citations are from this edition unless otherwise stated. 4 Guillaume de Lorris, continued by Jean de Meun, c. 1270–80, Roman de la rose, ed. by Strubel. All citations are from this edition unless otherwise stated. 5 Alain Chartier, 1424, La Belle dame sans mercy in Le Cycle, ed. and trans. by Hult and McRae. All citations are from this edition. For clarity, I refer to Alain Chartier’s text as the Belle dame (using minuscules) and Richard Roos’s translation as the Belle Dame (using capitals) throughout this book.

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about the Belle Dame, which have arguably exerted an influence on the reception of this poem which persists to this day: ‘the [translation] is somewhat dull and needlessly prolix […] but this is not a little due to Alain Chartier’ (my emphasis).6 Here, Skeat suggests that Roos’s translation simply transmits, almost mirror-like, the text written by Chartier, and that its relationship to that text is so close as to make a judgement about one result in the same judgement about the other. This is a critical standpoint which has persisted well past Skeat’s time, as Ashby Kinch has recently outlined. Kinch cites a wide variety of critical comments which more or less explicitly situate Roos’s translation ‘as a transparent signifier, whose allegiance to its source is presumed to be complete’.7 Similar judgements about close and tedious similarity to sources have been made, as we shall see, about the Romaunt:8 such approaches have had knock-on effects on the scope, depth, and complexity of critical engagement with these texts. The existence and critical reception of the Romaunt and the Belle Dame pose questions about the (often unspoken) processes by which we assign critical value to translated texts. Michelle Warren has recently critiqued the tendency to accord ‘low status’ to translations ‘within academic culture’, particularly where readers discern a lack of ‘originality’, a same-ness in relation to the source text: ‘translations generally only gain firm purchase in literary history when they somehow manage to surpass their source and to function as autonomous expressions’.9 In response to this prevailing view, Warren proposes ‘a decentred aesthetic order, one that would set aside the very notion that “originals” are worth more than their translations, “originality” more than repetition, “uniqueness” more than similarity’, proposing that ‘mere translations’ which are perceived as ‘derivative’ or ‘stylistically unremarkable’ nonetheless possess ‘cultural significance’ which we have, perhaps, not perceived.10 This is a significance which, she suggests, we might work to uncover by recalibrating our own critical frameworks in relation to translation; this book seeks to undertake such a recalibration in relation to the translations it examines. Recent critical interventions have suggested ways of provocatively destabilizing the very concept of ‘derivativeness’ in relation to medieval translation. For example, Jonathan Hsy’s discussion of the ‘polyglot nexus of trade and travel’ which formed a reality for many medieval readers, writers, and compilers suggests a pervasive multilingualism which undoes attempts to separate languages — particularly, in this case, ‘English’ and ‘French’ — into fully discrete or separate systems.11 Viewed 6 Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. by Skeat, p. 53. 7 Kinch, ‘A Naked Roos’, pp. 415–16. Comments about the Belle Dame of a similar nature to Skeat’s are ubiquitous; in addition to the citations provided by Kinch, see, e.g. Pearsall, ‘English Chaucerians’, p. 226: ‘Ro[o]s has managed to preserve a very creditable sample [of Chartier’s poem]’. 8 So, Caroline Eckhardt comments that ‘the predominant quality’ worthy of comment within the text ‘remains its fidelity to its source’ (‘Art of Translation’, p. 62), while Alfred David in Riverside describes it as ‘a very literal translation’ (p. 1103). 9 Warren, ‘Translation’, pp. 51–52. 10 Warren, ‘Translation’, p. 53. 11 Hsy, Trading Tongues, pp. 79, 7–8. Warren raises the same point in a different context: ‘Much discussion of interlingual transfer assumes we actually know when two languages are involved’, but there are significant ‘practical and theoretical problems that underlie this assumption […] The very

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within the framework of this linguistic situation, surely no translation can be said to be entirely derivative: we are not dealing with a movement between two fully distinct or entirely binary languages, because these languages already exist in a relationship of fluidity to one another. As Hsy explains, ‘the unidirectionality implied by translatio as it is commonly conceived has its own limiting […] teleology’: the ‘presumed linear trajectory’ of any act of translation, but perhaps most particularly of those translations which have been described as ‘derivative’ must be rethought in the wake of our sensitization to the polyglot surroundings of medieval ‘English’ literature.12 The limiting ‘unidirectionality’ here identified by Hsy refers implicitly, through use of the Latin term translatio, to the medieval concept of translatio studii et imperii, the transfer of knowledge, narrative matter, and geopolitical power from classical antiquity to the medieval present, given shape through translation from Latin into the European vernaculars. As Laurence Harf-Lancner notes, the development of these ideas inculcated a powerful ‘myth of cultural continuity across time and space […] from one civilisation to another’,13 famously constructed by Chrétien de Troyes at the opening of Cligès: Par les livres que nos avons les fez des anciens savons et del siegle qui fu jadis. Ce nos ont nostre livre apris qu’an Grece ot de chevalerie Le premier los et de clergie. Puis vint chevalerie a Rome Et de la clergie la some qui or est an France venue. (vv. 27–35)14 (We know about the deeds of the ancients through the books that we have, and our books have taught us this about past centuries: the Greeks were the highest praised for chivalry and learning. Then this chivalry and the sum of learning which is now in France passed to Rome.)

notion of “duality” in translation should be treated with caution from a theoretical point of view’. Warren, ‘Translating English Literary History’, pp. 495–96 and also pp. 507–08. Christopher Baswell suggests that we might consider the term ‘vernacular’ less a tool for separating discrete (non-Latin) languages than to refer to the ‘most comfortably used language or dense lexis of a particular local setting’, which could comprise an ‘array of language practices’ spanning varieties of several ‘languages’, including Latin: Baswell, ‘Competing Archives’, pp. 634, 638. The essays in the cluster published in 2015 in Speculum and introduced here by Baswell share a commitment to uncovering the specifics of local multilingual habits and effects (geographical, social, or bibliographical), what Wogan-Browne terms ‘little sociolinguistic nuggets of medieval evidence’, necessary to overturn totalizing narratives which set out discrete and hard boundaries between languages and contexts of use: Wogan-Browne, ‘Invisible Archives?’, p. 689. 12 Hsy, Trading Tongues, p. 72, also p. 56. 13 Harf-Lancner, ‘Chrétien’s Literary Background’, p. 33. 14 Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. by Harf-Lancner.

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Chrétien here lays emphasis upon the linguistic means by which translatio studii is effected, as well as carefully constructing its teleological temporal and geographical sweep. He also, however, highlights its dependence on books — objects that are both movable through time and space, and malleable, in the sense that they are open to physical alteration on a number of fronts as they exist within and between different times and spaces: Ceste estoire trovons escrite que conter vos vuel et retraire, en un des livres de l’aumaire mon seignor saint Pere a Biauvez ; de la fu li contes estrez don cest romanz fist Crestïens. (vv. 18–23) (We find/invent this story, which I want to tell and repeat/rework for you, written down in one of the books in the library of St Peter’s at Beauvais; from there the tale was extracted out of which Chrétien made this romanz.) The movement of classical ‘estoire[s]’, knowledge and power from East to West, antiquity to medieval present, relies upon a change of written language, a vernacular rendering or retelling (‘retraire’)15 of Latin texts. And such retellings — despite the effortlessly forward-moving trajectory which Chrétien seems to construct for them rhetorically — in fact involve additions, elisions, reshapings, and new juxtapositions of material, in what Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner characterizes (in relation to Chrétien in particular) as a ‘cannibalistic art’.16 This art is in part made possible by the perusal, dissection (both figurative and literal: Chrétien’s ‘conte’ is ‘estrez’, extracted from the ‘livre’), and reimagining, rewriting, recreating, or rebuilding of ‘molt ancïens’ (v. 24, ‘very old’) texts in manuscript books. Chrétien’s emphasis here on the physical reality of the ‘livres’ in the library is important because it partially undercuts or complicates the smoothness, the inevitability, and the mono-directional trajectory of his image of translatio from East to West. It thus embeds a question mark over the sufficiency of that seemingly simple model of westward movement which imagines classical languages as (always) the source and vernacular languages as (always) the target of an otherwise unchanged body of culture, knowledge, literature (studii), or power (imperii). In the first place, the ‘found book’ which, we are told, forms the source of Cligès is a recognized rhetorical topos in medieval writing: Chrétien’s text (as the double-edged verb ‘trover’ — ‘to find’ or ‘to invent’ — suggests) is not, in fact, the result of literally ‘finding’ and transmitting whole

15 As well as ‘repeat’, ‘retraire’ might be glossed as ‘re-translate’; cf. Marie de France’s use of the verb ‘traire’ in the Prologue to the Lais: ‘de latin en romaunz traire’, l. 30; Marie de France, Lais, ed. by Ewert. 16 Bruckner, ‘Cligès and Cannibalism’. See also Grimbert, ‘Cligès and the Chansons’, pp. 120–24 on the ‘intertextual dimension of this romance, a veritable tapestry into which Chrétien has woven the threads of many different sources’ (p. 123).

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a hitherto-unknown work.17 In the second place, and more pertinently for this book, manuscripts are here evoked by Chrétien as physical objects: at once static, carefully conserved relics or fragments of a past age which have been translated through time to the present, and generative opportunities for new literary imagination, creation, revision, reconstruction: the making of new texts and codices out of old. As we know, medieval books are unique items, their format and contents often idiosyncratic, unstable, not entirely uniform, and subject to the metamorphosing effects of time and use. Their relative material, and frequently textual uniqueness, which is bound up with their handcrafted form and the local circumstances of their production, poses a challenge to conceptions of medieval translation which suggest the possibility of equivalence or unproblematic derivation from one language to another.18 This is in part because of the textual variation which manuscripts can transmit, and in part because of the ways in which their individual material forms can reshape and reframe their textual content in a variety of paratextual fashions: ‘nonlinguistic forms interact with interlingual transformations, [such as] images [and] manuscript layouts’.19 Chrétien’s particular emphasis on the materiality of books as the source of translation partially frustrates or disrupts the sense of equivalence in content, and of smooth or linear movement from source to target, one language to the next, which is constructed by the East–West trajectory of his image of translatio. His gesture to the book is one which I will share, in that throughout this book I too read manuscript presentation as a core part of the ‘transformations’ which I explore. The observation that at the heart of translation lies disruption, tension between apparent replication or equivalence and profound alteration or displacement, is hardly a new one, either to medieval writers or to post-medieval theorists and critical readers.20 Rita Copeland, for example, has amply illuminated the ways in which translation from Latin is deployed by some vernacular translators to shape ‘not a supplement […] but a vernacular substitute’ for their source texts, a way of inserting and asserting the translator’s own ‘authorial power’.21 David Hult, too, has explored the ‘glossing activity of the translator’, who can embed interpretative commentary into translation, and whose activities suggest a wide and overlapping range of meanings for the term translatio: ‘transfer, adaption, paraphrase, explication, or what we commonly mean

17 The topos is discussed by Baumgartner, ‘Du manuscript trouvé’, and by Campbell, ‘The Library’. Campbell’s discussion in particular shows how libraries form a site of lability and movement: ‘a locus for the physical, temporal, and linguistic movement of the text: a place where works that have migrated from other locations and historical moments resurface in order to be passed on’, p. 190. 18 Warren draws attention to this in relation to Summerfield and Allen’s discussion of the Brut tradition in ‘Chronicles and Historical Narratives’. She remarks that there is an ‘enormous variety of textual record for Brut’ in manuscripts compared to ‘the relatively limited information available in printed editions. […] When it comes to direct textual comparisons, in other words, we often have no idea what we’re talking about’. ‘Translating English Literary History’, p. 502. 19 Warren, ‘Translating English Literary History’, p. 504. 20 For discussion of useful theoretical frameworks, see especially the excellent overview by Campbell and Mills in Rethinking Medieval Translation, pp. 8–16. On translation and creativity, Robinson, ‘Rethinking Creativity’, pp. 131–33. 21 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, pp. 179, 193.

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today by translation’.22 Douglas Kelly describes the ‘profound notion of art and enquiry that the term translatio covers’, involving an ‘expansion of vision and knowledge’.23 Translation comes to be understood as one of the most important and intellectually flexible frameworks within which generations of medieval authors consciously and discursively shaped their own literary productions. The development and understanding of vernacular authorship as a concept, Alastair Minnis and Rita Copeland in particular have shown, involved a close relationship to, and adoption of scholastic techniques, particularly Latin commentary traditions, concerning translation and adaption of pre-existent works.24 Minnis sets out a series of ‘categories and examples’ of ways in which ‘the implications of scholastic literary theory for vernacular literature’ may be assessed, two of which in particular are relevant here.25 The first of these is Minnis’s ‘commentary as source’: in many cases, medieval commentaries on classical and Scriptural auctores were the direct sources of certain statements and attitudes, images, etc., as found in the works of major vernacular writers. […] One might go so far as to say that it is the original text together with its accompanying commentary […] that should be regarded as the source.26 Related to this category is a second defined by Minnis, ‘medieval literary theory as interpretive aid’, which posits that ‘knowledge of how a given source was integrally interpreted and evaluated in medieval scholarship […] can provide vital clues to the plans and purposes of some of the writers who drew on that source’.27 Here, it is suggested that the commentary and gloss which physically accompanied a text may have been used in a more general way than as a specific source for certain materials, as it may have influenced the ‘interpretation and evaluation’ of the text by those who drew on it to produce their own texts. These traditions give rise to translated texts which complicate notions of sameness or straightforward transfer of narrative matter between languages. They suggest that a wide range of interpretative and creative acts were tied up with medieval translation, and were understood to be part of the translational process. This book, then, works to uncover the particular and detailed ‘cultural significance[s]’ of the translations it considers; it puts into practice Warren’s suggestion that we ‘set aside’ preconceived ideas about a binary of (good) originality versus (bad) repetition or derivative translation. It probes what makes a medieval translation

22 Hult, ‘Poetry and the Translation of Knowledge’, pp. 23, 21. Dembowski suggests that translations may also be ‘works of hermeneutics’, in which linguistic reshaping is fused with interpretative commentary, ‘Inspiration, Plagiarism and Translation’, p. 268. 23 Kelly, ‘Translatio studii’, pp. 303–05. 24 Minnis, Authorship; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, esp. the discussion of ‘autoexegesis’: ‘exegetical activity […] ostensibly in service to a foregoing, authoritative text […] [as] the agent of rhetorical invention […] impl[ying] effacement of foregoing auctores’, p. 185. 25 Minnis, Authorship, pp. viii–ix. 26 Minnis, Authorship, pp. ix–x. 27 Minnis, Authorship, p. xiii.

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‘good’ or ‘bad’, and asks how rooted in our own cultural time and place and our own disciplinary histories such judgements are.28 The translations I examine are, as we have seen in the example of Richard Roos’s Belle Dame, often critically characterized as ‘too’ similar to their French sources in their content or narrative matter; but their forms and styles are also subject to other negative assessments which are associated with a different kind of ‘sameness’. So, in the case of Roos’s poem, readers have also perceived close formal mimicry of what is seen as Chaucer’s characteristic poetics and literary style. Roos’s translation — his ‘English’ poetry — is frequently characterized as, stylistically speaking, uninspiringly similar to (although inevitably less accomplished than) Chaucer’s, even as the narrative content of his text is considered equally uninspiringly similar to Chartier’s poem.29 Perceptions of derivativeness in this translation are, then, a complex, two-pronged question of matter and of form. These are (implicitly or explicitly) viewed as distinct from one another: the ‘sameness’ that is criticized is a quality which can apparently relate to both ‘French’ content and ‘English’ form, simultaneously. Such a standpoint requires rethinking: not only are form and content, in my view, not as discretely separable as it might imply, but the position in which it places the translated text is one of dual — indeed, almost contradictory — total subordination to two precursors at once (can Roos’s Belle Dame be at once ‘the same’ as Chartier and ‘the same’ as Chaucer?). We might look to Hsy’s discussion of ‘triangulation’ between different versions and adaptations of the medieval Constance narrative as a way to reformulate the relationships here: his reading of these narratives ‘challenges us to think beyond binary modes of textual comparison and to explore concurrent, overlapping and circuitous networks of linguistic transformation’.30 The relationships between (in this case) Roos’s Belle Dame, Alain Chartier’s Belle dame, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetry might be better thought of as ‘triangulated’, ‘concurrent’, ‘overlapping’, and always in motion, than rigidly, hierarchically binary and chronologically or teleologically structured through relationships of precedence and derivation. In the following chapters, I look to reconsider in detail particular acts of translation, in order to problematize critical judgements which have classed certain translated Middle English texts as derivative and unremarkable and to explore the way in which translation between French and English is used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a method of participating in creative, long-running, and well-known traditions of response to the translations’ French sources. Identifying and exploring this participation, of course, contributes to a much broader, flourishing field of recent critical discussion concerning the complex and various interrelationships between what we think of as ‘English’ and ‘French’

28 Campbell and Mills discuss evaluative judgements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ translation, Rethinking Medieval Translation, pp. 3–5. 29 Ad Putter undertakes this kind of reading of form in Roos’s Belle Dame: ‘Fifteenth-Century Chaucerian Visions’. 30 Hsy, Trading Tongues, pp. 78–79.

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languages, literatures, and cultures in this period.31 Butterfield in particular has recently argued forcefully that monolingual literary histories cannot adequately account for the close interlingual interactions between English and French which we witness throughout the Middle Ages: what we now consider as linguistically, nationally, and institutionally discrete disciplines, traditions, and areas of study must, rather, be considered as deeply intertwined.32 My focus in this book, then, is on one particular aspect of this intertwined literary history: in arguing that the translations I discuss show awareness of the debates which surround their source texts, I propose that their translators were fully cognizant of — and, indeed, are implicated in shaping — wider, cross-Channel traditions of response to these source texts. Traditionally, such traditions of response have been approached critically as part of ‘French’ literary history, and have been studied in the disciplinary context of medieval French literature. However, it has become important to consider their relevance as influential and wide-ranging discussions which could, and did, have an impact on what we think of as ‘English’ literary practice. Understanding the nature of this impact involves probing more deeply the translations’ inauspicious critical reception, most particularly the role that connection to Chaucer has had to play in this reception. In the case of each translated text, I argue that a long-standing connection with Chaucer has exacerbated a sense that these translations are, in one way or another, neither critically interesting nor particularly accomplished; ironically, rather than according them prestige, their association with one of the most acclaimed writers of the Middle Ages has caused them to be overlooked. Both translations have been linked with Chaucer in different ways: the Romaunt, whose linguistic features suggest that more than one translator may have been involved in its production, is usually partially assigned to a very early period in his literary career, although the evidence for this remains speculative, and the English Belle Dame is one of a number of fifteenth-century poems which were repeatedly collected by readers, scribes, and printers within a loosely recurrent group of works by Chaucer and others in manuscript and print. Richard Pynson, the Belle Dame’s earliest printer, who printed the text in his 1526 Boke of Fame (STC 5088) with some of these works, described it as ‘translated out of frenche in to Englysshe by Geffray Chaucer’, thus paving the way for its eventual presence in what Kathleen Forni has termed ‘the counterfeit canon’ of ‘Chaucerian Apocrypha’ — a position which it

31 See, e.g. the essays in Wogan-Browne and others, eds, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain; Kleinhenz and Busby, eds, Medieval Multilingualism; Putter and Jefferson, eds, Multilingualism in Medieval Britain; Hsy, Trading Tongues; the essay cluster introduced by Baswell, ‘Competing Archives’ in the 2015 issue of Speculum; Butterfield, ‘Rough Translation’ and Familiar Enemy. 32 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy; see also Hsy, Trading Tongues, pp. 6–8, 24–25. Coldiron comments that ‘critical categories are built upon linguistic, temporal and national boundaries: we largely teach and study national, monolingual literatures’. Coldiron identifies translations as a particularly important site of enquiry to ‘counter the framing terms of our standard critical practice’, ‘Translation’s Challenge’, p. 315. The ways in which thinking across languages can enrich our critical responses to a single medieval author — John Lydgate — is brilliantly uncovered by Bianco, ‘A Black Monk in the Rose Garden’ and Kamath, ‘Curse of Genius’.

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has occupied since its eighteenth-century rejection from the Chaucer canon by Thomas Tyrwhitt.33 The impact which these long-standing links with Chaucer has had on the reception of the two translations is profound and goes some way towards explaining the prevailing view that these translations are, in their different ways, disappointingly literal, derivative, or ‘close’ rather than innovatively independent or creative in their approach to their source texts. The translations’ particular connections to Chaucer enable us to situate a general academic disinclination to value a translation that is perceived as derivative in a very specific context: that of our own critical sense of what a text by Chaucer ‘is’, how we define it, and the qualities we expect it to have. To quote Seth Lerer, ‘Chaucer’s poems are Chaucer’s because they fit into a critically constructed notion of just what his poetry was’.34 Lerer here discusses fifteenth-century construction(s) of Chaucer; however, his comments are just as applicable to current approaches to his work. So, Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, for example, probing the rationale behind the critical acceptance of Chaucer authorship for certain so-called ‘short poems’, point to the extent to which widespread acceptance of Chaucer attribution for the well-known poem Adam Scriveyn in fact relies on an unarticulated sense that this is the kind of clever poetry we expect from Chaucer, rather than on extraordinarily convincing surviving evidence. By comparing the critical rejection of a second short poem, copied and attributed to Chaucer by the same scribe as copied and attributed Adam Scriveyn, they show the extent to which our own critical biases and desires can determine the ostensibly objective critical act of assigning a poem a place in the canon.35 Discussions such as those of Boffey and Edwards make clear that the current ‘critically constructed notion’ of what Chaucer’s literary output is — including his translated output — often revolves around a sense, more or less explicitly articulated, of original genius.36 Thomas A. Prendergast likewise describes a critical ‘valorization of originality (and later “genius”)’, born of repeated attempts to establish an ‘authentic’ Chaucer text,

33 Richard Pynson, The Boke of Fame made by Geffray Chaucer: with dyuers other of his workes (London, 1526). Contents: Chaucer, The House of Fame, Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls, Roos, The Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Chaucer, Truth, Christine de Pizan, The Morall Proverbes, Anon., The Complaint of Mary Magdalen, Anon., The Letter of Dido. See Forni, Counterfeit Canon. Skeat discusses Tyrwhitt’s rejection of the Belle Dame from the canon, Chaucerian and Other, ed. by Skeat, pp. 51–53. 34 Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, p. 121. We might compare Lerer’s discussion of the formation of the canon of Shakespeare’s works: ‘Including and excluding works from the production of an author are […] acts not just of literary criticism but of cultural affirmation. They help to define the nature of authorized literary production’ (p. 7). 35 Boffey and Edwards, ‘Chaucer’s Chronicle’. Lerer discusses Adam Scriveyn’s key place within the Chaucer canon as ‘the epitome of Chaucerian making’, Chaucer and his Readers, p. 142. 36 Trigg describes ‘the desire to prove that Chaucer’s genius was timeless and universal […] Identifying Chaucer’s sources is the best way of measuring the contrast between the general run of medieval learning and Chaucer’s genius’, Congenial Souls, p. 180. Butterfield probes the critical discomfort associated with Chaucer’s intertextual use of Machaut and other French-language texts in The Book of the Duchess, Familiar Enemy, pp. 270–74.

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which ‘has persisted well into the twentieth century’.37 Indeed, Warren, following Copeland, describes Chaucer as the textbook case of an ‘author-translator’ whose status as an ‘author’ seems to overcome the aesthetic pitfalls generally attributed to translation. Chaucer […] practices it [i.e. translation] in such a way that translatio turns rhetorically into a new kind of auctoritas.38 Those translations which are seen as overly literal or ‘close’ to their sources are not perceived as fitting well with this recognizable description of Chaucer’s practice, which privileges a sophisticated use of translation into the vernacular to develop and encode an independent, original stance — indeed, a voice of individual genius — as a key component of Chaucer’s work. I do not mean to suggest here that this is not a valid description of the way in which Chaucer often approaches translation. Rather, I seek to explore the critical reception of translations linked to Chaucer which do not seem to employ this methodology, focusing particularly on translations from French. In a recent article dissecting John Lydgate’s ‘alteration through iteration’ of the Roman de la rose’s allegorical landscape and characters, Kamath has elegantly exposed the pitfalls of applying a ‘modern conception of literary genius’ to Lydgate’s poetic practice when analysing his poetic engagement with the Rose, leading her to conclude that ‘denigration of the communal activities of imitation and translation keeps us from appreciating the full complexity […] of Lydgate’s intertextual and figurative strategies’.39 In the case of the Romaunt, a similar ‘denigration of […] imitation and translation’ as they are seen to operate in this poem has, in different ways, acutely devalued it as a Chaucer production, and relegated it to a place on the fringes of the Chaucer canon, in a category of marginal, early works by a writer whose mature brilliance and originality (so the argument goes) far outstrips these rather uncomfortable beginnings. Yet the reasoning which has placed the Romaunt at the very opening of the canon has been circular: as we shall see, its perceived lack of quality as very derivative translation has been seen as indicative proof of Chaucer’s youth and inexperience when he (supposedly) composed it, even as that same youth and inexperience is offered as the reason for its apparent poor quality. In the case of the Belle Dame, its Chaucer association (particularly Pynson’s attribution to Chaucer) has led to a conceptualization of the text as an apocryphal ‘contamination’ from which the Chaucer canon has, thankfully, been freed.40

37 Prendergast, ‘Fabrication of the Chaucerian Text’, p. 6. 38 Warren, ‘Translation’, pp. 52–53, and ‘Translating English Literary History’, p. 499: ‘when translation fades into creation, texts that “pass” for original receive the highest accolades. The collapse of one binary (translatio/inventio) thus undergirds another: success/failure’. For Chaucer, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation, esp. pp. 185–202 on translation as displacement in the Legend of Good Women. 39 Kamath, ‘Curse of Genius’, pp. 57–58. 40 Miskimin describes Pynson as the first person to ‘contaminate’ the Chaucer canon with non-Chaucer material in The Boke of Fame, Renaissance Chaucer, pp. 243–44. Compare Forni, ‘Stigma of the Chaucerian Apocrypha’.

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Despite its early excision from the canon, however, the Belle Dame continues, even today, to be described routinely as a ‘Chaucerian’ text — a text defined or categorized in relation to Chaucer, and placed firmly in his shadow.41 It is only very recently that the poem has begun to receive critical attention on its own terms;42 much more common is still to approach it as a kind of substandard imitation of Chaucer, a text which had been mistaken for Chaucer’s due to its ‘Chaucerian’ stylistic mimicry. So Pearsall (in a chapter entitled ‘The English Chaucerians’) describes Roos’s poetic performance in the Belle Dame as ‘the measure of Chaucer’s achievement in giving English a courtly style and diction’ (my emphasis) — an achievement which Roos apparently borrowed wholesale for a further imitative act, that of closely ‘preserv[ing]’ Chartier’s poem.43 I would not wish to underplay Chaucer’s influence on the poetry of the fifteenth century — an influence which was undoubtedly carefully and consciously shaped and constructed at particular moments and to particular ends by poets such as Hoccleve and Lydgate.44 Nonetheless, I think it is important to emphasize here that Chaucer is perhaps not the only author to whom Roos was responding, nor was he necessarily attempting to shape his translated work wholly or unproblematically ‘in the image’ of Chaucer’s writing. Indeed, locating a stable and unified ‘Author Chaucer’ who would have been available to fifteenth-century poets is perhaps illusory: Ralph Hanna’s arguments about the early manuscript circulation of many of Chaucer’s most canonical works point to ‘a more various author, and a far more various reception […] a different, more fractured […] Chaucer the author’ than we have allowed for.45 Terming the Belle Dame ‘Chaucerian’ ensures that its perceived debts to Chaucer are repeatedly foregrounded in the way in which it is critically categorized: it creates a perception that the text participates first and foremost in a larger fifteenth-century poetic tendency to create and promote Chaucer as a poetic father-figure or master. This perception in turn makes it hard to see any engagement with Chaucer’s work

41 Witness the most recent edition of the Belle Dame in Symons’s collection entitled Chaucerian Dream Visions and Complaints, and the most recently published essay to deal substantially with the text, Putter’s ‘Chaucerian Visions’. 42 Almost exclusively in the pioneering work by Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’ and ‘To corecte in any part or alle’. 43 Pearsall, ‘The English Chaucerians’, p. 226. 44 Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, Part I: Authorising Text and Writer presents a series of extracts (1.5–1.9) entitled ‘Chaucerians’ and Authorship which chart a group of authors who ‘explicitly position themselves in relation to Chaucer’, and, later, ‘in relation to Lydgate, Chaucer and Gower’, p. 16. Jenni Nuttall argues for a wide range of literary identities and poetic voices for Hoccleve, suggesting that this voice is only in part ‘Chaucerian’, and does not employ Chaucer in a purely imitative way, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’s Poems for Henry V’. Langdell argues that ‘Hoccleve’s Chaucer does not predate the text [The Regiment]; rather it is the product of the text’, ‘Thomas Hoccleve and the Making of “Chaucer”’, p. 253, see also Langdell, ‘Reappraisal of Poetic Authority’, pp. 284–86. Perkins gives a nuanced exploration of Hoccleve’s poetic conjuring with Chaucer: ‘Haunted Hoccleve?’, esp. pp. 116–17 on ‘finding’ Chaucer both in the sense of locating his lost presence and inventing him anew. On John Lydgate, see Scanlon, ‘Lydgate’s Poetics’, pp. 64–66. 45 Hanna, ‘Presenting Chaucer as Author’, pp. 177 and 194. See also Hanna, ‘The Hengwrt Manuscript and the Canon of the Canterbury Tales’, pp. 140–55 and, more recently, Simon Horobin, ‘Compiling the Canterbury Tales’.

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as anything other than slavishly imitative. In fact, Roos’s deployment of intertextual references to Chaucer is far more complex than the label ‘Chaucerian’ suggests. Investigating the particular kinds of pressures that their connections to Chaucer have exerted on the reception of the Romaunt and the Belle Dame as translations is helped by an exploration of the rather vexed adjective (and noun) ‘Chaucerian’, and how we might best define this term. Both translations have been described as ‘Chaucerian’ — in several senses of the word. They have been seen, variously, as ‘by Chaucer’, ‘like or characteristic of Chaucer’, ‘closely imitative of or indebted to Chaucer’, or ‘bibliographically associated with works by Chaucer’ — and the term ‘Chaucerian’, when applied to these texts, can cover any of these definitions, sometimes more than one at once. The remainder of this opening chapter outlines the development of this term, and considers the different ways in which it has been employed: what does it mean to call a text (or an author or a codex) ‘Chaucerian’? Chapters 2 to 5 then turn to the texts which are at the core of this study, The Romaunt of the Rose and The Belle Dame Sans Mercy. In the case of each text, I explore the interpretative tradition of commentary and debate which surrounds their French source, and which is articulated both through that source’s material presentation in manuscripts and through other texts composed in its wake. These debates, I argue, inform and shape the Middle English translations in a number of ways. The translations themselves, then, participate in the traditions of discussion to which they respond, frustrating attempts to place them in a derivative position, either in relation to their sources or to the work of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucerian Meanings It is a fitting paradox, perhaps, that the adjective ‘Chaucerian’, which apparently underwent a spike in usage at the very moment in the nineteenth century at which the modern Chaucer canon was under construction,46 developed into a term which could mean both ‘characteristic of ’ or (indeed, sometimes ‘hence’) authentically ‘by Chaucer’, and, simultaneously, could be used to describe an ‘inauthentic’ Chaucer text or interpolation, a text which is precisely not Chaucer, although bearing some resemblance to, or connection with, his work.47 Defining ‘the Chaucerian’, then, turns both on establishing what elements can be said to characterize Chaucer’s writing, and on what features of a text can be pointed to as an inauthentic, incomplete, or otherwise unconvincing imitation of those characteristics. So much is suggested by the title of an edition which forms a milestone in the nineteenth-century usage of 46 Of the five example citations given in OED1, four date to the mid- to late nineteenth century, with only one dating earlier: OED1, ‘Chaucerian’, adj. and n. The entry remained unchanged in OED2, and has not been updated since. The related term ‘post-Chaucerian’ was apparently coined in the late nineteenth century; the earliest given citation in OED3 is 1889. 47 For the nineteenth-century establishment of the Chaucer canon, see Knapp, ‘Chaucer Criticism and its Legacies’, pp. 331–41, Trigg, Congenial Souls, pp. 157–85 and ‘Discourses of Affinity’, and the essays in Ruggiers, ed., Editing Chaucer.

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the term ‘Chaucerian’: W. W. Skeat’s 1897 volume Chaucerian and Other Pieces.48 This publication is defined in its subtitle as ‘a supplement to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer’, which Skeat had already published in 1894.49 The ‘supplementary’ nature of the pieces contained is described by Skeat in relation to their importance: they are ‘the most important, from among the very numerous ones which have been appended to Chaucer’s works in various editions’.50 Quite what Skeat means by ‘important’, and the manner in which such importance might be determined is unclear here, as is the qualitative difference between a ‘Chaucerian’ text and the vaguely defined ‘Other’ material which is included in the edition. Indeed, his definition of ‘Chaucerian’ is also at times imprecise. At the start of his introduction, Skeat uses the term with the prefix ‘non-’ seemingly to refer to all texts which are not by Chaucer but are transmitted alongside his works in early printed copies: ‘of the non-Chaucerian pieces printed by Thynne in 1532, I have included all but three’.51 ‘Chaucerian’ appears here to denote ‘by Chaucer’; yet this usage complicates the title of Skeat’s volume, Chaucerian and Other Pieces, because no text in the supplementary volume is considered ‘Chaucerian’ by Skeat in this sense; all the ‘Chaucerian and Other’ texts in the edition are, in fact, non-Chaucer (and therefore, perhaps, all are Other in a more conceptual sense). In sum, Skeat’s use of the term ‘Chaucerian’ in his title appears to be confusingly at odds with his deployment of it in the course of the work: in the title of the book, he seems to use it to denote works like Chaucer’s; in his own prose it is at times used implicitly to refer to works by Chaucer. Skeat’s purpose in printing this supplement to his full edition of Chaucer’s works is precisely to isolate the ‘Chaucerian’ from ‘Chaucer’: by placing works which have historically been ‘appended’ to Chaucer’s into a separate and supplementary volume, Skeat can point by comparison to what he believes is the ‘genuine’ Chaucer canon.52 As he states at the close of his introduction: Not a single piece in the present volume ought ever to have been ‘attributed’ to Chaucer. That any of them should have been so attributed — and some of them never were — has been the result of negligence, superficiality and incapacity.53 The ‘Chaucerian’ text here becomes the ‘non-Chaucer’ text par excellence, the text so like Chaucer’s as to be masquerading ‘superficially’ — on its surface only — as canonical, but which has been carefully weeded out of the canon by an attentive and knowledgeable reader, a reader unlike those who were incapable of distinguishing

48 The most frequent usage of ‘Chaucerian’ recorded across OED example citations occurs when the title of this volume is being cited, reflecting nineteenth-century interest in the creation and elaboration of the category ‘Chaucerian’. 49 Chaucerian and Other, ed. by Skeat. 50 Chaucerian and Other, ed. by Skeat, p. ix. 51 Chaucerian and Other, ed. by Skeat, p. x. Skeat is referring to William Thynne’s 1532 edition entitled The Werkes of Geffray Chaucer, which formed the bedrock of future collected editions of Chaucer’s works. 52 As James Simpson observes, ‘it is precisely the need to isolate Chaucer’s genius that produces a dismissive account of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century followers’, ‘Chaucer’s Presence and Absence’, p. 251. 53 Chaucerian and Other, ed. by Skeat, p. lxxxiv.

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‘Chaucer’ from ‘Chaucerian’. The existence and definition of the ‘Chaucerian’ is here dependent on being ‘like’ Chaucer, inspired by Chaucer, mistaken for Chaucer, appended to Chaucer in a supplementary volume — even as the term is used implicitly in the same introduction to denote ‘genuine’ Chaucer texts. Texts which are ‘Chaucerian’ and ‘Other’ can only be defined if a ‘Chaucerian canon’ is established — and vice versa. More recently, it has often been the case that two such mutually dependent uses of the term ‘Chaucerian’ are evoked simultaneously by commentators, with confusing and imprecise results. Hosington, for example, discussing fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies of verse, describes their contents as ‘either authentically Chaucerian or “neo-Chaucerian”’, developing the latter term from Boffey and Thompson.54 Presumably, the phrase ‘authentically Chaucerian’ here suggests works by Chaucer, while the ‘neo-Chaucerian’, in implicit contrast, suggests works which are ‘Chaucerian’ in that they are perceived as ‘like’ Chaucer’s. Hosington’s ‘neo-Chaucerian’ texts include the Belle Dame; however, later in the same article she also describes this text as ‘Chaucerian-type’.55 Is this the same category as ‘neo-Chaucerian’? Or does it denote a text ‘like’ a neo-Chaucerian text, itself ‘like’ an ‘authentically Chaucerian’ text? We could compare Coldiron’s theoretical distinction between ‘Chaucerianism’ and ‘post-Chaucerianism’, where the first is a ‘direct engagement with or imitation of Chaucer’ and the second is ‘an indirect evocation of what would have been recognizable as Chaucerian’.56 Where precisely these lines of distinction might be drawn, in practice, however, is surely deeply unclear. How might we distinguish between a ‘Chaucerian’ and a ‘post-Chaucerian’ text, between a ‘neo-Chaucerian’ and a ‘Chaucerian-type’ text? Hosington and Coldiron implicitly perpetuate a model of thinking about fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and early sixteenth-century literature which places ‘authentic’ writing by Chaucer at its centre, and attempts to stratify non-Chaucer works into a series of relative ‘Chaucerian’ categories, which decrease in their ‘Chaucerian-ness’ as they move further away from Chaucer. Membership of this series of categories is dependent on how closely or ‘directly’ those texts appear to imitate or otherwise evoke Chaucer. Indeed, perhaps a similar impulse prompted Skeat to refer to Chaucerian and Other texts in the title of his supplement. Was he here thinking of a model akin to that of Coldiron or Hosington, in which a ‘Chaucerian’ text and an ‘Other’ text share the status of not-authentic-Chaucer, but can be further differentiated from one another on the basis of their relative similarity to, or departure from the norms of ‘real’ Chaucer? In her description of the English Belle Dame, Hosington suggests that this paradigm is modelled on the material contexts — the manuscripts and early printed books — in which the text was transmitted. By attributing the Belle Dame to Chaucer, she argues, Pynson was ‘simply following the pattern of earlier Chaucerian anthologies which had included […it] as authentic’.57 The manuscript tradition of the Belle Dame is

54 55 56 57

Hosington, ‘Translation,’ p. 55. Compare Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, p. 280. Hosington, ‘Translation’, p. 55, my emphasis. Colidiron, ‘Paratextual Chaucerianism’, p. 13 n. 2. Hosington, ‘Translation’, p. 55, my emphasis.

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rooted in a series of fifteenth-century poetic anthologies, as is well known — yet the suggestion that these anthologies explicitly present it ‘as authentic’ Chaucer is, in my view, misleading. This suggestion derives from a critical assumption that these books aim to collect and present a central ‘core’ of ‘authentic’ Chaucer works, surrounded by a selection of ‘Chaucerian’ imitations which are at once differentiated from the ‘authentic’ texts, and included precisely because of their imitative relationship to them. The reality is more complex. For example, the Belle Dame appears in one of the so-called ‘Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts’ established by Hammond in 1908. These are manuscripts which — although defined by Hammond in relation to Chaucer — actually contain a wide variety of texts by Chaucer and others, including Lydgate, Hoccleve, and much anonymous verse.58 The Belle Dame appears in the Fairfax manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16), and in two further fifteenth-century anthology manuscripts which have been linked to the ‘Oxford Group’, Longleat House, Marquess of Bath, MS Longleat 258 and Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.6 (the Findern manuscript). A fourth copy of it is found in Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.19, described by Alexandra Gillespie as a ‘commercially produced codex’ in which it is again gathered amidst a larger group of other works, including some by Chaucer and Lydgate.59 As much recent scholarship on these and other fifteenth-century anthologies has argued, however, these manuscripts are not usually discernibly organized on an ‘author-centric’ principle.60 Nor are they concerned with the rigorous establishment and transmission of a fixed Chaucer canon which excludes or subordinates inauthentic or ‘apocryphal’ texts. As Forni notes, even Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27, clearly a Chaucer collection (the only extant manuscript in which the Canterbury Tales appears with Troilus and other poems by Chaucer), contains the Temple of Glass, a poem well-known in the fifteenth century as Lydgate’s.61 Where works by Chaucer feature in these manuscripts, they do so as part of a wider collection of texts, both attributed and anonymous. As Ralph Hanna has observed, the need to produce a canonical volume of Chaucer’s ‘Works’ ‘addresses a professional

58 On the textual affiliations between the ‘Oxford Group’ manuscripts, Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MSS Tanner 346, Fairfax 16, and Bodley 638, see Hammond, Chaucer, pp. 280–83. The texts in these manuscripts are thought to have circulated in independent booklets, enabling readers to choose the contents of a commissioned manuscript by selecting particular booklets for copying and inclusion; see Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies’, p. 281 and MS Tanner 346, ed. by Robinson, p. xxv. 59 Gillespie, Print Culture and the Medieval Author, p. 131 n. 70. See also Mooney, ‘John Shirley’s Heirs’ and ‘Scribes and Booklets’. 60 See e.g. Gillespie, Print Culture, esp. pp. 104–10; Boffey, ‘Proverbial Chaucer’; Boffey and Edwards, ‘Chaucer’s Chronicle’ and ‘Scotticisation of Middle English Verse’; Edwards, ‘Fifteenth-Century Middle English Verse Author Collections’; Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers. Dutton discusses compilation, anthology, and miscellany as creative works which do not usually focus on the output of a single author, Late Medieval Devotional Compilations, pp. 3–5. 61 Forni, ‘Stigma’, p. 433.

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necessity which is ours and neither the author’s nor scribes’’.62 Terming these manuscripts ‘Chaucerian anthologies’, then, is surely problematic. It privileges an interpretation of the manuscripts which invariably focuses on separating and subordinating non-Chaucer to Chaucer, the merely ‘Chaucerian’ to the ‘authentic’, but there is very little evidence that this was an overriding concern felt by their creators and earliest readers. The shift from copying Chaucer to printing Chaucer also reflects this, as has been recently argued by Gillespie and Forni in particular.63 Richard Pynson’s Boke of Fame, which contains the earliest printed version of Roos’s Belle Dame, similarly gathers a range of works together, some by Chaucer and some by others. Although Pynson certainly makes use of Chaucer’s name to frame and market this volume, as Gillespie has argued, its contents have also been fruitfully analysed in the context of the thematic links they set up, in an attempt to move beyond an author-centred discussion of the book as an inaccurate attempt at Chaucer canon formation. Both Gillespie and Boffey have emphasized the importance of the Boke’s mobilization of a range of different female voices, for example.64 Gillespie, importantly, identifies Pynson’s inclusion of the Belle Dame as a central feature in this regard, Pynson’s focus on its translation from French functioning for her as a way of tying the book to collections of French-language responses to Alain Chartier’s Belle dame.65 Pynson seems to assert the difference of this collection of texts from their French counterparts via his incipit to the Belle Dame, which he describes as translated by Chaucer, ‘flour of peotes [sic] in our mother tong’. The reference to ‘our mother tong’ in conjunction with translation from French suggests an ‘English’ which stands unproblematically independent of the French language and its writing. Yet Pynson’s smooth projection of a uniform or single English ‘mother tong’ shared with and between all his readers (apparently synonymous with the elevated poetic discourse of Chaucer, ‘flour of peotes’) is surely problematic.66 In The Boke of Fame, Pynson in fact produces a volume with persistent, and persistently articulated, French connections. These are foregrounded precisely through the insistence on Franco-English translation which appears in Pynson’s incipits and explicits: the Letter of Dido, as well as the Belle Dame, conspicuously advertises itself as a text translated from French, with a French cultural and intertextual identity, and The Boke also includes the Morall Proverbes, a translation of Christine de Pizan’s Proverbes moraulx which equally conspicuously advertises Christine’s authorship.67 Caxton had issued the Proverbes as a stand-alone text in 62 Hanna III, ‘Presenting Chaucer as Author’, p. 176. 63 Gillespie, Print Culture and Forni, Counterfeit Canon; ‘Stigma’. 64 Gillespie, Print Culture, p. 128, and Boffey, ‘Letter of Dido’. 65 Gillespie, Print Culture, pp. 128–29. 66 Cf. Butterfield’s discussion of the vexed and complex associations of the mother tongue in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Familiar Enemy, pp. 341–47: ‘The language in which one lived one’s childhood may not be the same as the language that one uses most in which to write, even if it is ostensibly the “same” language. […] However artlessly oral it appears, Chaucer’s English is a constructed neo‐language not a “simple” vernacular’. 67 Gillespie, Print Culture, pp. 128–29. The translation of ‘Dido’ is explored by Boffey, ‘Letter of Dido’. Boffey elsewhere discusses Pynson’s core commercial identity as importer of French material onto the English market: ‘English Printing’.

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1478, and Pynson used this edition as his copy text for the Boke of Fame, although he deliberately removed Caxton’s envoy, so that the book is no longer ascribed to an English translator by an English printer at its close.68 Christine’s Proverbes are immediately followed by a first-person verse text entitled The Complaynt of Mary Magdaleyne, itself followed by the Letter of Dido.69 These texts’ French-language connections are still further underlined through the bibliographical make-up of the book itself: Pynson’s woodcuts and borders were sourced from Antoine Vérard in Paris.70 The question of a single, universally shared ‘mother tong’ is once again brought into question by this choice of texts and the volume’s title: Pynson was Norman by birth and his decision to entitle his 1526 collection The Boke of Fame may owe as much to an interlingual pun as it does to a perceived deference to Chaucer’s House of Fame as the collection’s opening work. To a francophone speaker, the word ‘fame’, although often spelled differently, is pronounced identically to ‘femme’ — so Pynson’s Boke of Fame is also, to a bilingual reader, a ‘book of femme’, a book of, or about, women, filled with female voices. It has been plausibly suggested that one of the motivating factors behind the production of this book may have been commercial competition with Wynkyn de Worde, competition which centred around de Worde’s ostentatiously anti-feminist, anti-Criseyde edition in 1517 of Troilus and Criseyde (STC 5095).71 Pynson also issued editions of The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde in 1526, and some of these volumes were bound together with the Boke of Fame by their purchasers, perhaps even by Pynson himself.72 The pairing of the Boke with Troilus in the context of de Worde’s 1517 enterprise creates an alternative, pro-feminine incarnation of Criseyde buttressed by a range of female voices. These voices are gathered in a women-centred ‘boke of fame’ which can implicitly push back against Criseyde’s fear that the voices in books must ‘shende’ her for all time, that she will have no future right of reply to her own various textual iterations.73 The connections between texts — connections which are constructed and articulated through their collection, juxtaposition, and paratextual presentation in manuscripts and printed books — are far more varied here than a simple sense of Chaucer plus Chaucerian material, more complex than a separation of works ‘by’ Chaucer from works ‘like’ Chaucer’s. They encompass debate — about women, their voices, their textual presence — and they encompass translation of, 68 Coldiron discusses Caxton Proverbes, and the printer’s envoy to Earl Rivers, their translator, in Between the Sheets, pp. 44–52. 69 Coldiron, Between the Sheets, pp. 56–65 describes the transition between the Proverbes and the Complaint, and suggests the possibility (given weight by Pynson’s page layout) that he decided late in the day to extend the scope of his volume to include a wider range of female voices. 70 On Pynson’s use of Vérard’s woodcuts and borders, see Boffey, ‘Letter of Dido’. 71 Benson and Rollman discuss de Worde’s anti-feminist envoy to his 1517 Troilus: ‘Ending of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’. Foley suggests possible competition between Pynson and Worde: ‘Richard Pynson’s Boke’, pp. 19, 154–56. 72 Foley, ‘Richard Pynson’s Boke’, pp. 17–18, 40–47. On possible in-house binding by Pynson, see Gillespie, Print Culture, pp. 126–27 and n. 58. 73 Troilus and Criseyde in Riverside, v, 1058–60: ‘Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, | Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge | No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende.’

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and allusion to Francophone literary productions in a way which acknowledges the deep embeddedness of these productions in ‘English’ literary practices. The label ‘Chaucerian’, as it is used by (for example) Coldiron and Hosington, when applied to such books, inevitably places Chaucer in the centre of critical approaches to their contents from the very start. This is a position which has been limiting, and which has arisen largely out of post-medieval approaches to the Chaucer canon. These approaches are, indeed, sometimes inscribed upon the manuscripts themselves. For example, in Trinity Coll., Cambridge, MS R.3.19’s copy of the Belle Dame, we can see that the urge to connect this text (and unattributed others within the manuscript) visibly and explicitly to Chaucer was very clearly a post-medieval one; on fol. 98r, the opening of the text, a medieval reader has simply noted the title of the poem in the top margin (‘labell dame Saunce Mercy’), where the rubricator has omitted to place a title. But the owner of a much later eighteenth- or nineteenth-century hand has felt the need to assert Chaucer’s authorship for this poem in the right-hand margin (‘by Chaucer’).74

74 This and a second later hand have added the same attribution to several works in Trinity Coll., Cambridge, MS R.3.19 including The Assembly of Ladies, The.x. Commandments of Love, The.ix. Ladies Worthy, and The Legend of Good Women. See James, The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, no. 599.

Chapter 2

Contesting the Roman de la rose

Le Roman de la rose has been cited by Dembowski as an exemplary instance of the ambiguous and fluid space between literary ‘inspiration’, ‘vernacularization’, translation, ‘adaptation’, and what we would now term ‘plagiarism’.1 It thus provides an important starting-point for considering ways in which translation between vernacular languages and different forms of commentary and debate might dovetail. The key questions which it raises in relation to authorship, translation, and contest foreshadow many of those that I will go on to consider not just in the context of its own, particular relationship to the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose (the subject of the next chapter), but throughout the whole of this book.2 This chapter, then, will explore the Rose as a site of multiple types of interpretative commentary and conflicted or contested readings: rewriting and continuation (both Jean de Meun’s rewriting of Guillaume de Lorris’s text and those of later reworkers);3 codicological presentation in a variety of manuscripts; and, finally, the hotly contested interpretations of the text exchanged between a group of readers whose interpretations of, and attitudes to, the Rose radically differ.4 This is the early fifteenth-century Querelle du Roman de la rose, which took place c. 1402–03 in the form of an exchange of letters between Provost of Lille Jean de Montreuil, Parisian chancery notaries Gontier Col and Pierre Col, Chancellor of the University of Paris Jean Gerson, and Christine de Pizan.5



1 Dembowski, ‘Learned Treatises’, p. 257. 2 Marco Nievergelt describes the ways in which ‘dialogic altercation is […] a central means of creating and negotiating meaning in The Rose, and similarly determines the complex dialogic modalities of the Rose’s reception as a continued, multi-vocal and conflictual debate’, ‘From disputatio to predicatio’, p. 143. 3 Notable Rose-remaniements include those of Gui de Mori (c. 1290) and the so-called B-remanieur (c. 1290–1300). Also of note is the Roman de la rose moralisé undertaken by Jean Molinet at the end of the fifteenth century; based upon the structure of the Ovide moralisé, this text reworks the Rose in prose, divides it into chapters and then adds a moralité to each chapter, mapping an explicitly Christian allegory onto the Rose. See further Croft, ‘Pygmalion and the Metamorphosis of Meaning’. 4 These are, of course, not the only methods by which the Rose was discussed; Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’, ed. by McWebb, esp. pp. xxi–xxxvi gives an account of the different contexts in which such debate took place. 5 Christine de Pizan and others, Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose’, ed. by Hicks is the standard critical edition. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des epistres du debat, ed. by Valentini is a valuable addition to Hicks’s work which focuses on editing Christine’s version of the Querelle particularly.

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Debating the Rose in England: An English Readership for the Rose and the Querelle? As has been widely acknowledged, the Roman de la rose had a seismic and far-reaching intellectual and artistic impact on readers and writers throughout the Middle Ages.6 Its cultural and intellectual freight reached throughout medieval Europe; it was translated into other European vernaculars,7 and transmitted in a huge variety of manuscripts which circulated outside the (fluctuating) borders of France — including, of course, in England.8 These manuscripts — their layout, decoration, annotations, and structure — formed one of the principal means by which interpretative commentary on the poem was articulated; the Romaunt of the Rose was produced by and for readers who would most probably have been aware of the ways in which manuscript presentation of the poem formed a means of articulating textual interpretation. The Querelle also raises questions about Rose-interpretation which would not have been alien to, or removed from an English audience. As we shall see, it survives most frequently today in the form circulated by one of its bestknown participants, Christine de Pizan, who incorporated a selected dossier of its documents into presentation manuscripts of her literary works. These manuscripts circulated in England as well as France: the so-called Queen’s Manuscript, BL, MS Harley 4431 (created c. 1413), was acquired by John of Bedford, regent of France 1422–35, as part of ‘the grete librarie that cam owte of France’.9 Christine was already well known as an author in the late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century in England: her son was in England with the son of the earl of Salisbury from 1398, and then at Henry IV’s court, and she apparently sent manuscripts of her work to Salisbury (acquired on his death by Henry IV), although declining Henry’s invitation to come to England herself.10 Coldiron has concluded that ‘the reception history

6 See, e.g. Badel, Réception; Swift, Gender, Writing and Performance; Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers; Cerquiglini-Toulet, La Couleur de la mélancolie; Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition; Knox, ‘The Romance of the Rose’. 7 Huot, Medieval Readers, p. 157 and Lesnik-Oberstein, ‘Adapting the Roman de la Rose’ discuss the Dutch adaptation. For the Italian adaptation of the Rose, see Barański and Boyde, eds, The ‘Fiore’ in Context. 8 Florence, Bib. Riccardiana, MS 2755 has been shown to contain annotations in an English hand (Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, pp. xxvii–xxviii) and also appears to have circulated in Italy. For a sense of the diversity and scale of the manuscript tradition of the Rose, see, for example, the excellent Johns Hopkins manuscript digitization and cataloguing project [accessed 17 September 2015]. Knox gathers surviving manuscript evidence of the Rose’s circulation in Britain, ‘The Romance of the Rose’, pp. 53–71. 9 I cite from Stratford’s publication of an inventory of Bedford’s books, ‘The Manuscripts of John, Duke of Bedford’, p. 339. John of Bedford acquired this ‘grete librarie’ — the contents of the Louvre library — in 1425. His books (both those from the Louvre and from other sources) were dispersed on his death in 1433. 10 The most recent summary of the situation is given by Downes, ‘Christine de Pizan’s French in England’, pp. 458–59. See also Ellis, ‘Chaucer, Christine, Hoccleve’, p. 39 and Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, p. 55.

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records that her work reached […] bilingual and in many respects bicultural […] readers on both sides of the channel’.11 More specifically and importantly for my focus on the Querelle, Thomas Hoccleve translated her Epistre au dieu d’amours, composed in 1399, into English very early in the fifteenth century, around 1402: contemporary with the unfolding Querelle.12 Christine herself cites this text (along with her Dit de la rose, also composed c. 1402) as an important complement to the dossier of letters which form the Querelle in her manuscripts. Both poems represent an initial foray into Rose-critique for Christine and the Epistre in particular contains in condensed form some of the central points which she will elaborate more fully in the Querelle.13 Opinion has differed on the translatorly tactics used by Hoccleve and their ideological motivations14 but regardless of whether he is to be read as sympathetic to Christine’s pro-feminine agenda or not, the fact that he knew, translated, and circulated the Epistre shows that there clearly was an awareness of some of the key issues which would be contested within the Querelle in England in the early part of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, the Querelle-documents proper did not only travel as a group of texts clearly connected to Christine through inclusion in her presentation manuscripts. Berkeley, University of California Bancroft Library, MS UCB 109 is a single, booklet-format copy of the Querelle-documents, which was obviously created as a free-standing pamphlet. It presents the documents in the format and order that Christine uses in her manuscripts; however, it was copied by one of the earliest participants in the controversy, Gontier Col, for Jean, duke of Berry (who also possessed a second copy of the Querelle in one of Christine’s collected presentation manuscripts, BnF, MS fr. 835).15 Eric Hicks records another booklet-format Querelle-manuscript, now lost, which was owned by Louis, duke of Orléans:16 it seems very probable that versions of the Querelle could at the time have circulated much more widely in this more ephemeral form, and could easily have reached a readership on both sides of the channel. Indeed, Nadia Margolis has suggested that the earliest exchanges in the Querelle (April–August 1401), in which Jean de Montreuil sent a now-lost treatise in praise of the Rose to Gontier Col and to Christine, took place while Gontier was in England, where he was negotiating for the return to France of Richard II’s widow

11 Coldiron, Between the Sheets, p. 40. 12 Poems of Cupid, ed. and trans. by Fenster and Erler gives the text of both Christine’s Epistre au dieu d’amours and Hoccleve’s Lepistre de cupide (the title he gave the work in his autograph manuscript of it, San Marino, Huntington Lib., MS HM 744). 13 Explicit discussion of the Rose in the Epistre is found, for example, at vv. 365–406 (on the Ovid-Jean de Meun diad); cf. Hoccleve, Lepistre, ll. 246–301. On Christine’s Epistre as corrective to the Rose, see Brownlee, ‘Discourses of the Self ’ and Walters, ‘The Woman Writer and Literary History’. On Christine’s pro-feminine stance in the Epistre and its cultural context, see Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture, pp. 44–49. On the Dit, see Margolis, Introduction, pp. 59–61 and Tarnowski, ‘The Lessons of Experience’, pp. 183–86. 14 Excellent discussions are found in Poems of Cupid, ed. and trans. by Fenster and Erler, pp. 159–67, Knapp, Bureaucratic Muse, pp. 45–75, and Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, pp. 107–17. 15 Christine de Pizan, Livre des epistres, ed. by Valentini, p. 11 and n. 4. 16 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. xlvi–xlvii n. 96.

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Isabelle of Valois. Margolis also speculates that Christine may have met Gontier in England around this time whilst visiting her son there.17 Contesting interpretations of the Rose, then, should certainly not necessarily be seen as a phenomenon whose terms and articulations were solely confined to French soil; in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, there could have been many ways to grasp and consider the contestedness of the Rose. Its Middle English translation existed in a cultural and literary environment which would almost certainly have been familiar both with the poem and with some of the key interpretative and socio-cultural debates associated with it, debates which we shall now examine.

Commentary through Rewriting: The Bi-authored Rose The Rose is, as David Hult notes, ‘a strikingly self-conscious example of literary continuation as a mode of rewriting or of critical reinterpretation’.18 In terms of size alone, at roughly eighteen thousand lines long, Jean’s contribution outstrips Guillaume’s by about fourteen thousand lines, and his continuation is well known for its broad extension of Guillaume’s relatively focused dream vision format to include a huge variety of topics, personae, and digressions.19 In order to examine briefly and precisely Jean’s commentary on Guillaume’s chosen narrative form, structure, and mode, I confine myself to one particular passage, ll. 10,530–10,608, which contains the moment at which Amours describes the authorial ‘handover’ from Guillaume de Lorris to Jean de Meun.20 These lines constitute what Hult has labelled an ‘authorial digression’21 on the part of Amours, who is (until this point) a character within the Rose, but who now ‘seemingly steps outside of the fictional space’, in the course of a formal address to his assembled ‘baronnie’ (v. 10,445, ‘group of barons’).22 Alongside his troops, Amours addresses the reader, describing the impetus behind the composition of the Rose: Gallus, Catillus et Ovides Qui bien sorent d’amours trestier, Nous reüssent or bien mestier. Mais chascuns d’aus gist morz porriz ! Vez ci Guillaume de Lorriz Cui jalousie sa contraire Fait tant d’angoisse et de duel traire 17 Margolis, Introduction, p. 62. 18 Hult, ‘Jean de Meun’s Continuation’, p. 99. 19 The so-called ‘B-recension’ of the Rose displays particular interest in the differences between Guillaume and Jean’s sections, attempting to adapt them so that they ‘fit’ one another more closely; see Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, chap. 4. 20 Other sections of the text may, of course, also be investigated in this light: see, for example, Martin, ‘Away from Self-Authorship’. 21 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, p. 14. 22 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, p. 16.

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Qu’il est en perill de morir, Se je ne pens del secorir. […] Et plus encore me doit servir, Car pour ma grace desservir Doit il commencier le rommant, Ou seront mis tuit mi commant. (vv. 10,526–34; 10,551–54) (Gallus, Catullus, and Ovid, who know well how to write of love, would also be a great help to us, but each of them is dead, rotting in the ground! See here Guillaume de Lorris, who Jealousy, his enemy, has made to suffer so much worry and pain, that he is in danger of death. […] And he [i.e. Guillaume] must do still more to serve me [i.e. Amours], for to deserve my favour he must begin the roman in which all my commandments shall be written down [i.e. the Rose].) Here, as is well documented, Amours charts an uninterrupted line of poetic succession. The love-poets of antiquity, Gallus, Catullus, and Ovid, are the direct predecessors of Guillaume — who is, as we read, ‘en perill de morir’, almost dead, and thus suspended in an intermediary state between the ancient poets, who are ‘morz porriz’, and the ‘here and now’ of Amours. Furthermore, Amours goes on to chart how this poetic succession will pass forward to Jean de Meun. His discourse thus enacts or charts a form of (amatory) translatio studii, as we saw it described by Chrétien in Chapter 1: the narratives and knowledge of the classical past become re-envisioned, reworked, and resituated in the conjoined Rose, whose two authors are fashioned as the direct inheritors of the classical love-poets, privileged members of a line of writers stretching back to antiquity.23 Amours’s use of the pronoun ‘il’ at v. 10,553 has as its referent the mention of ‘Guillaume de Lorriz’ by name at v. 10,530, and Amours goes on to describe the particular moment at which Guillaume will stop composing the Rose, using a precise, word for word quotation from it to signal the end of Guillaume’s composition, and the beginning of Jean’s continuation: Jusques la le fournira Ou il a bel acueill dira […] ‘Mout sui durement esmaiez Que entroublie ne m’aiez’ […] Ci se reposera Guillaumes […] Puis vendra Jehans Chopinel […] Car quant Guillaumes cessera, Jehans le continuera Aprés sa mort, que je ne mente, Anz trespassez plus de.xl. (vv. 10,555–94)

23 Sylvia Huot explores the Rose’s classical, particularly Ovidian, models of composition, desire, and knowledge about love, and Jean de Meun’s appropriation and interweaving of Ovidian narratives into his portion of the poem: Dreams of Lovers, Lies of Poets.

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(He [Guillaume] will continue it to the point at which he says to Bel Acueil ‘I am very anxious at the idea that you might have forgotten me’ […] Here Guillaume will take his rest […] and then Jean Clopinel will come, for once Guillaume has stopped writing, Jean will continue it [i.e. the Rose], to tell the truth more than forty years after his [i.e. Guillaume’s] death.) This strategy initially appears clear to a reader; until, that is, we remember that the moment cited by Amours actually took place some 1500 lines previously, at l. 4050. If Guillaume in fact laid down his pen at this point, the 1500 lines of text that we have been reading from l. 4050 to the passage quoted above were, in fact, composed by Jean de Meun masquerading as Guillaume’s narrator: in the words of Hult, at the point of Amours’s authorial digression, the text being read is actually […] that of the continuator Jean de Meun, and it situates its own beginning at a point of rupture hitherto unmarked and/or unnoticed within the narrative movement of the poem.24 However, the situation is more complicated still, given Amours’s use of the future tense to describe something which, in terms of the readerly experience, has already happened. Guillaume stopped writing at l. 4050, yet will only begin to write down the Rose after Amours has laid siege to the castle, an event that has not yet occurred within the dream-narrative. ‘Jehan’, moreover, ‘vendra’ (‘is to come’) forty years after Guillaume’s death: who, then, has been composing the text that we have read? Who was dreaming and narrating Amours’s speech? If, furthermore, the text is still to be understood as the continuing récit of a dream which Guillaume-as-narrator had, how could a second author-narrator possibly take it over at any point?25 Such questions are persistently highlighted by Jean de Meun in the methods he employs to introduce his continuation of Guillaume’s text. Rather than passing over the problematic shift from one author to a second in silence, he chooses to highlight it retrospectively in such a manner as to force his readers to interrogate the very structure and narrative format upon which the text they are reading is built. Amours’s digression is placed almost 24 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, p. 14. As Martin notes, the fact that de Meun speaks not of himself as continuator, but of his narratorial alter-ego, ‘Jehan Clopinel’ adds a further layer of complexity to this ‘point of rupture’; see ‘Away from Self-Authorship’, pp. 1–9. Butterfield examines the ‘intricate web of confusion that Jean throws over his role as author’ in relation to Gower’s shifting authorial stance in the Confessio Amantis, ‘Articulating the Author’, pp. 83–85, noting that Jean de Meun becomes ‘halffictionalized’ in the Rose, referred to only in the third person as ‘Jehan Clopinel’ by Amours (p. 85). See also her comments in ‘The Confessio Amantis and the French Tradition’, esp. pp. 174–75. 25 Jean de Meun’s handling of the Rose’s dream vision format compounds this difficulty. Not only does his narrator apparently continue Guillaume’s dream, but certain characters he inserts into the Rose at times express overt scepticism about the truth-value of dreams. This stands in direct contradiction to Guillaume’s prologue, which places the Rose explicitly on the side of ‘true’ and ‘interpretable’ dreams, situating it within an illustrious and authoritative tradition of dream-commentary signified by Macrobius’s commentary on the dream of Scipio (ll. 1–10). De Meun, however, knowingly ‘undermines the authority […] of the foundational literary form in which the Rose is composed’, Minnis, Magister Amoris, p. 8.

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exactly at the mid-point of the full text (i.e. that of Guillaume and Jean together); Jean de Meun deliberately places vexed questions about authorship, textual appropriation, and interpretative reworking at the very heart of the Rose. A brief exploration of some of the ways in which the shift from Guillaume to Jean is handled by scribes and illuminators clarifies the situation further. David Hult details both the placement and content of certain miniatures depicting the composition of the text within the Rose, noting that many are, in fact, retrospectively placed between the two parts of the poem (i.e. Guillaume’s and Jean’s), rather than at the moment of Amours’s speech.26 Such placement is sometimes accompanied by a rubric making clear the transition between Guillaume and Jean.27 One manuscript, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M. 948 (fol. 44r) features a miniature in which the Lover-narrator (now Jean de Meun?) looks through a doorway at Guillaume de Lorris’s dead body: an image which recalls (or, narratively speaking, pre-empts) Amours’s speech with its evocation of Guillaume’s death. Decisions such as these obviously foreshadow the effect of Amours’s speech; a reader is no longer quite so jolted, already being aware of the Guillaume–Jean transfer. Some manuscripts, however, place miniatures and rubrics at the relevant point in Amours’s speech. Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS fr. 66 illustrates this moment (fol. 87v), using an image which highlights the troubling time-lapse between Amours’s words and Jean’s apparent arrival on the scene. Here, Amours and Jean de Meun are depicted as duplicated, parallel figures, Amours on the left and Jean on the right. Both are seated on identical raised platforms, in almost identical postures. Amours gestures with his hands towards Jean de Meun’s back while Jean’s hands, similarly raised in front of him, are employed in writing on a scroll which hangs over the front of his desk. This miniature visually cements Jean de Meun in his role as Amours’s poet; it is captioned ‘comment amour prophete de maistre iehan chopinel quil […] continuera le ioli rommans de la rose’ (how love prophesies of maistre jean clopinel that he will continue the beautiful romance of the rose). Also notable for its miniature at this point in the text is BnF, MS fr. 1569, which contains a miniature directly before the words ‘Puis vendra Jehan clopinel’ (fol. 68v, then Jean Clopinel will come), depicting one man in the act of passing a book to a second.28 Both men, moreover, have one hand raised to signal verbal conversation, forming a striking and complex visual image which brings together the idea of the transition and physical ‘translation’ of the Rose through Jean’s added material on the one hand, and on the

26 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, pp. 77–97. These miniatures can take the form either of one person depicted writing in a book or of two writing simultaneously (e.g. BL, MS Stowe 947, fol. 30v). 27 As in BnF, MS fr. 378, whose long explanatory rubric is transcribed in Roman de la rose, ed. and trans. by Strubel, p. 244 and by Butterfield, ‘Mise-en-page in the Troilus Manuscripts’, p. 78. Butterfield examines the ways in which the transition from Guillaume to Jean is handled bibliographically, and its possible relationships with author-portraits in the Confessio Amantis, ‘Articulating the Author’, pp. 84–85. 28 On which see Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, pp. 88–89, and fig. 9. Lori Walters gives a succinct and useful summary of author portraits and rubrics pertaining to authorship found in some Rosemanuscripts in an appendix to Brownlee and Huot, eds, Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’.

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other, the sheer impossibility of two first-person narrators speaking, supposedly, in a single narrative voice, to recount a single dream. Such paradoxes are, however, presented as central to hermeneutic understanding within the Rose, the text which famously reminds its readers that Ainsi va des contraires choses: Les unes sont des autres gloses; Et qui l’une en veult defenir, De l’autre li doit souvenir. (vv. 21,577–80) (So it goes with opposites; one glosses the other. Whoever wants to define one must understand the other.) From the very opening of Guillaume’s text, there have been reiterated promises of a ‘glose’, an exposition of the ‘true’ sense of the dream.29 However, Jean’s long-promised final revelation of meaning takes the form not of an explanation but of a ‘gloss-inaction’: the deliberate and jarring juxtaposition of two ‘contraires choses’ which mutually illuminate each other as the Lover is described plucking his desired rose, consummating his sexual passion, and worshipping as a pilgrim at a shrine all in the same moment.30 Similarly, juxtaposition of two contraries — so aptly illustrated by the BnF, MS fr. 1569 miniature — is essential for the questions raised concerning authorship of the Rose to be fully appreciated by readers. Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s respective Rose-texts are also ‘contraires choses’: Jean’s forms a kind of interpretative commentary on that of Guillaume. It is precisely through such mutually ‘glosing’ juxtapositions that meaning or signification within the Rose may best be located.31 Badel comments that: ‘la continuation de Jean de Meun peut à bon droit être tenue pour une longue glose du récit de Guillaume [et] il apparaît que cette glose ‘met à la question’ le texte’ ( Jean de Meun’s continuation can rightfully be considered a long gloss on the narrative of Guillaume [and] it appears that this gloss puts the text to the test).32 The gloss on Guillaume’s Rose provided by Jean de Meun, in the guise of simple continuation, both comments critically upon its source text, and forms a constituent part of that text. The translations into English that I discuss enact a similar interpretative dynamic, through the process of translation rather than continuation.

29 Compare the opening prologue to the dream, where it is specifically claimed that the ‘art d’amours est toute enclose’ (the art of love is all enclosed within it, v. 38); v. 2069, at which the narrator claims that ‘dou songe la senefiance’ (the interpretation or lesson of the dream) will be revealed in due course; or v. 10,607, at which Amours promises that Jehan Clopinel will ‘la chose espondre’ (explain or gloss the thing fully). 30 A culmination which is in some respects typical of the ways in which the crude and the elevated are placed side by side by de Meun throughout his portion of the Rose (on which, see further Minnis, Magister Amoris, chap. 2). 31 Huot describes how ‘the discourse of desire and sexuality emerges [in the poem] as a deflection from or a resistance to some other discourse; or as a kind of undertow, hidden but still discernible in what passes overtly for a discussion of some wholly other topic’, Dreams of Lovers, p. 4. 32 Badel, Réception, p. 24.

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Jean de Meun’s commentary through continuation gave early readers of the Rose a welcome opportunity to inscribe their own interpretations onto the text in a similar fashion.33 Jean de Meun’s ostentatious insertion of his own narrator figure into the pre-existent Rose, and the persistent emphasis he places upon the peculiarly complex nature of such an insertion appear to have influenced several remanieurs, most notably Gui de Mori, whose c. 1290 remaniement of the Rose displays a keen awareness of Jean de Meun’s hybrid role as author, continuator, and commentator. Gui distinctively adapts the Rose-text, excising and adding passages where he feels necessary, yet also making use of a ‘system of diacritical signs […] to mark and classify his textual alterations’,34 so that a reader of his Rose is well aware of them and of his presence within it.35 Gui’s activities clearly have their precedent in the actions of Jean de Meun; as Hult argues, he evidently ‘wishes to fix himself in a tertiary position’ behind Guillaume and Jean.36 His insertion of a descriptive self-portrait to mirror those of Guillaume and Jean into Amours’s discourse at the mid-point of the text bears this point out;37 Gui’s remaniement demonstrates the extent to which the manoeuvre undertaken by Jean de Meun was understood and appreciated by readers of the Rose. Gui conceives of the Rose not as a fixed or immutable entity, but as a space which could contain a potentially infinite number of overlaid authorial voices, none of which can be designated as either utterly conclusive or fully authoritative.

Debating the Rose: The Querelle du Roman de la rose Perhaps the most compelling evidence that the Rose was considered an interpretatively contested text is the existence of the Querelle. Within this often heated epistolary exchange of opinions, the Rose becomes the central battleground for several related hermeneutic debates in which the role and responsibilities of an author in relation to his or her work are examined. The content of the Rose, in particular its notorious anti-feminist and obscene passages, thus becomes the explicit subject of contest and debate. It is rare, within the Querelle, that the question of dual authorship that we have just examined is mentioned; indeed, the discussion confines itself almost exclusively to Jean de Meun’s material. On the rare occasions that Guillaume is mentioned, the 33 As Huot’s study demonstrates, ‘the evidence of the manuscripts shows […] that the medieval reception of the Rose was pluralistic rather than monolithic. […] A similar diversity characterizes the textual tradition itself ’, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 37. Huot introduces and analyses what might best be described as a continuum of responses to the text, ranging from ‘nota’ signs beside passages of interest, through marginal comments, removal of certain passages, to wholesale reworking of the text, pp. 34–46. 34 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, p. 41. 35 Comparable commentating activities are undertaken much later in the textual history of the Rose by Jean Molinet, whose Rose moralisé intercalates clearly marked passages of religious exposition into the text of the Rose. 36 Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, pp. 49; 34–55 and Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 85–124 discuss Gui’s remaniement. 37 On this self-portrait, see further, Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 90–93.

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aim does not appear to be to discuss in any great depth the content of his input into the Rose. Rather, Guillaume is employed by Pierre Col as a convenient tool to at once authorize, and excuse, Jean de Meun’s additions to the Rose. In his long response to Christine de Pizan and Jean Gerson, Col states that son propos fu de poursuir la matiere commensee […] par Guillaume de Lorris. […] Et ce qu’il dit ou chapistre de Jalousie et de la Vielle et an autres lieux touchans le fait d’amours, il le fist en poursuyant l’euvre commencee par Guillaume.38 (His aim was to continue the subject matter begun by Guillaume de Lorris, and that which he says in the chapters of Jealousy, the Old Woman, and in other parts touching the act of love, he says because he is continuing the work begun by Guillaume.) The Rose’s dual authorship here allows Col, when it suits him, to blur the boundaries between the ‘contraires choses’ which form Guillaume’s and Jean’s contributions. Jean de Meun cannot be blamed for the contentious content of the Rose, he states, for he merely continued someone else’s text: Guillaume is to blame for having ‘commensee […] la matiere’. Not without irony, one suspects, Col affects to ignore the emphasis placed by Jean de Meun on the complexities and opportunities offered by self-insertion into an unfinished text, glibly presenting his Rose-contribution as a fluid and uncomplicated continuation of ideas started by Guillaume. The reality, as Col was clearly well aware, was a long way from such a simple formulation. In what follows, I will be examining the Querelle du Roman de la rose from two perspectives. First, focusing principally upon the sustained and detailed engagement of Christine de Pizan and Pierre Col with one another, I will consider the nature of their debate about the Rose. The readings developed by Col and Christine within their letters form a remarkably explicit articulation of many of the interpretative issues which come into play when a contested text is being translated. Secondly, I will focus upon extant bibliographic witnesses to the Querelle itself. While the content and structure of the Querelle has received sustained critical attention in recent years,39 its bibliographical presentation, particularly the single extant version of it which was not presented as part of a collected manuscript of Christine’s works, has been less frequently considered.40 As the Querelle repeatedly contests Rose-interpretation, so it itself becomes contested ground. Early on, Christine seizes the opportunity to ‘claim’ the Querelle as her own, presenting it as a constituent part of her own œuvre. This move allows her both to restructure it significantly prior to its publication, and to employ it as a method of consolidating and promoting her position as female vernacular author. However, the key evidence provided by BnF, MS fr. 1563 demonstrates that Christine’s was not the only context in which the Querelle was presented; certain

38 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 106–07. 39 For example Badel, Réception, chap. 8; Hult, ‘Hermeneutics of Censorship’; Monaghan, ‘Querelles’; Desmond, ‘Ethics of Reading’; Minnis, Magister Amoris, chap. 5; Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, chap. 2. 40 This version is found in BnF, MS fr. 1563. Cayley’s discussion of Querelle-manuscripts (Debate and Dialogue, chap. 2) restricts itself to those prepared by Christine de Pizan.

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readers were creating and encountering a very different version of it. The difference in presentation and focus between these two versions of the Querelle highlights the ways in which bibliographic form may affect and shape interpretation. In a letter to Christine de Pizan in which he strenuously defends Jean de Meun against her accusations of obscenity and misogyny within the Rose, Pierre Col claims to locate precisely the only moment in the entire work at which Jean de Meun speaks in his own voice, as ‘aucteur’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his desire to defend de Meun against Christine’s attack, Col situates this authorial voice at precisely the section of the Rose in which responsibility for unpleasant or shocking content (specifically insults to the clergy and to women) is conveniently laid at the door of pre-existent texts: la come aucteur dit que ‘nul ne doit fame despire’ [l. 15,179] […] et si fait protestacion que ce n’est pas s’entencion ‘de parler contre home vivant | sainte religion suiant’ [ll. 15,222–23] […] et que si y a paroles trop baudes ou trop foles, que ‘ce requeroit matiere’ [l. 15,143] […] et qu’il n’y fait ‘riens fors reciter’ [l. 15,204].41 (There as author he says that ‘no-one should slander a woman’ and he protests there that it is not his intention ‘to speak against any man alive who follows the holy religion’ and that ‘if there are too foolish or bawdy words,’ that ‘his subject matter enjoined him’ [to use them], and that he ‘does nothing but repeat’ [what others have said].) De Meun, Col notes, says himself that he did nothing but repeat what others said before him, that he was reluctant to give offence but was enjoined to do so by the nature of the text that he was writing, which required that such sentiments be repeated. Christine, therefore, should not blame the Rose for that which she finds within it. Such a defence is patently disingenuous, as Christine scornfully points out in her reply to Col: ‘ je scay bien qu’il n’est mie le premier qui ait dit mal, mais il l’accroist quand il le recite’ (I know well that he is not the first to say bad things [about women], but he augments them when he repeats them).42 The verb ‘accroitre’ is an apt one. Not only does Christine imply that de Meun’s recital of anti-feminist stereotypes43 ‘increases’ their influence in the sense that it re-disseminates or multiplies them in the context of copies of a new (and popular) work, she also insinuates that they may be more concretely augmented by additional material inserted by de Meun himself. Sure enough, immediately after claiming he does nothing ‘fors reciter’ (but repeat), de Meun continues, Se par mon geu, qui poi vous couste, Quelque parole n’i ajouste 41 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 110. Pierre Col here displays one of his characteristic tactics within the debate: word-for-word quotation of sections of the Rose for specific and detailed comment. This technique caused Baird and Kane to dub him ‘the first “modern” critic of the Rose’, Baird and Kane, ‘In Defense of the Opponents’, p. 303. 42 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 140. 43 Principally found in the sections of the Rose dealing with the characters ‘La Vieille’ (The Old Woman) and ‘Ami’ (Friend) especially Ami’s long ventriloquization of a jealous husband.

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Si com font entre’euls li poete Quand chascuns la matiere trete. (vv. 15,239–42) (Except for making a few additions for myself, which do you no harm. Poets do this amongst themselves when they each speak in their own way of their subject.) By juxtaposing a claim that he merely ‘repeats’ with an explicit reference to adding ‘quelque parole’, de Meun makes allusion to what has been widely recognized as a key self-presentation strategy developed by medieval vernacular authors: an ostentatious expression of passivity in relation to foregoing texts precisely when deviating from those texts.44 Indeed, his reference to what ‘chascuns [de] […] li poete’ (each one of the poets) does ‘entre’euls’ (among themselves) is peculiarly suggestive. De Meun speaks not only for his own additions, but raises the spectre of seemingly limitless reinterpretation and alteration of material in the hands of many different writers, a process which is implicitly hidden from the unsuspecting reader, performed ‘entre’ euls’ alone. Christine correctly recognizes that at the very moment at which de Meun casts himself as humble and reluctant compilator of pre-existent anti-feminist material, he also audaciously draws attention to the ‘quelque parole’ he adds to the Rose, and, therefore, to his own authorial agency.45 It seems that most medieval readers of the Rose did understand it as Jean de Meun’s own text, facilitating the conferral upon him of the status of vernacular auctor through the cumulative processes of citation, adaptation, and gloss.46 Indeed, one of the paradoxes of Christine’s engagement within the Querelle, gleefully insinuated by Col, is that the Querelle-documents themselves form a detailed commentary upon the text of the poem, and as such contribute to the cumulative process of its ‘authorization’, not to mention its wide dissemination and ever-increasing notoriety: par aventure faingnés vous blasmer le dit livre pour cause de l’essaucer par esmouvoir les escoutans les paroles a le lire […] et en ce cas, les repreneurs devroient estre tenus assés pour excusés, car la fin et leur entencion seroit bonne, quelque moyen qu’il y eust.47 44 See, for example Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, Part I: Authorising Text and Writer, p. 9 for a succinct exploration of such assumed passivity. See also Minnis, Authorship, pp. 194–99 and Burrow, Medieval Writers, pp. 31–34. 45 For an exploration of Bonaventure’s oft-cited distinction between the different categories of writer, including the auctor and the compilator, see Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, Part I: Authorising Text and Writer, pp. 3–5 and, Burrow, Medieval Writers, pp. 29–31. 46 Minnis suggests that ‘the processes of authorization […] auctoritas and canonicity are culturally conferred rather than the inevitable external reaction to literary merits which are inherent in the text’, Magister Amoris, p. 31. For a discussion of the ways in which such ‘auctoritas and canonicity’ are conferred upon de Meun via the Rose, see Badel, Réception, pp. 694–95. For an investigation of Jean de Meun as a culturally constructed auctor of medieval anti-feminist discourse in particular, see Swift, Gender, Writing and Performance, pp. 33–68. 47 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 109. Swift details the ways in which precisely such concerns are articulated elsewhere within the pro-feminine poetic responses to the Rose of the querelle des femmes: Gender, Writing and Performance, esp. pp. 40–46.

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(But perhaps you are pretending to denounce the said book in order to promote it, and to incite people to read it […] and in this case, any critics of the Rose must be excused, because their intention was good, no matter which method they employed.) Col’s defence of Jean de Meun’s speech ‘come aucteur’ (as an author) is closely analogous to his defence of the speech of the ‘personnaiges’ which cause Christine so much anxiety, le Jaloux and la Vieille.48 Castigating Christine for her ‘fole oultrecuidance’ (insane presumptuousness), Col sets out clearly the difference he perceives between the ‘personnaiges’ within the Rose and their creator’s own views: Je […] dy que maistre Jehan de Meung en son livre introduisy personnaiges, et fait chascun personnaige parler selonc qui luy appartient. […] Et est trop mal pris de dire que l’aucteur tiengne les maulx estre en fame que le Jalous, en faisant son personnaige, propose: non fait […] mais il recite ce que tous les jours ung jaloux dit de toutes fames.49 (I say that Jean de Meun introduced characters into his book, and he made each character speak as he should […] And you cannot argue that the author believes the same bad things of women as Le Jaloux, in his character, claims to believe: he does not do so […] rather, he repeats what a jealous man says every day about all women.) Col draws a clear distinction between what the characters in the Rose say about women, and Jean de Meun’s own opinions, just as he underlines the (supposed) difference between anti-feminist material in the Rose that is copied from pre-existing texts and material invented by Jean de Meun.50 Yet Col’s use of the verb ‘reciter’ here — precisely the same verb as that employed within the Rose and later in the same letter cited by Col as evidence of de Meun’s authorial speech — hints at his awareness of a more complex situation. ‘Reciter’, as we have just seen, is used by de Meun to convey not just a sense of repetition, but also a sense of addition to prior material, and of innovative manipulation of it. Christine shows herself well aware of this nuance; she responds to Col that ‘selonc le gieu que on vuelt jouer il convient instrumenz propres, mais la voulanté dou joueur les appreste telz come il luy fault’ 48 See Minnis, Magister Amoris, p. 226, and Brown-Grant’s excellent discussion of Christine’s approach to the workings and ethics of literary authority, Moral Defence of Women, chap. 1, esp. pp. 28–51. 49 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 100. Minnis explores the development of such a ‘critical principle’ and its theoretical precedents, Magister Amoris, pp. 220–22. In the phrase ‘fole oultrecuidance’ Col reiterates precisely the kind of misogynist generalizations which Christine locates and deplores within the Rose, drawing on the widespread anti-feminist stereotype of women as irrational (‘fole’), and attempting to ‘reinforce the vast divide which should pertain between male and female in terms of learning and authority’ by labelling Christine’s intervention presumptuous, Brown-Grant, Moral Defence of Women, p. 21. 50 Several readers have highlighted what they feel is Christine and Gerson’s failure to grasp Col’s point; for example, Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, p. 361 and Fleming, Allegory and Iconography, p. 107. Brown-Grant has convincingly shown that Christine (and Gerson) do understand this principle, and has explored their approach to the Rose’s personification allegory, Moral Defence of Women, pp. 37–43.

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(in order to play the game you want to play, you need the correct instruments, but the desire/will of the player employs them in the way that he needs to, p. 132). Here, blame for the creation of the text, the ‘gieu que on vuelt jouer’, is laid directly at the door of the ‘joueur’, de Meun, who chose to ‘appreste[r]’ anti-feminist fictional characters, rather than at that of the ‘instrumenz’ or characters themselves. This description explicitly figures him as in (authorial) control of a text which he produces through his own ‘voulanté’ or ‘will’.51

The Contested Querelle: Self-Promotion and Bibliographic Presentation Critical examination of extant Querelle-documents most usually focuses upon Christine’s publication of two slightly different dossiers52 of certain Querelle letters as part of larger manuscripts of her collected works.53 As Cayley has most recently shown, Christine’s very early decision54 to take the initiative and publish a selection of letters within her own works may best be read as an attempt to ‘organize […] the Querelle de la Rose on her own terms’.55 For the most part, Christine appears to have 51 Christine also notes the extent to which Col’s ‘voulanté’ is at work in his reading of the Rose, highlighting, for example, the times at which he contradicts his own argument in order to claim a ‘bon mot’ for de Meun when it happens to have been spoken by one of his characters; see Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 143 and Brown-Grant, Moral Defence of Women, p. 41. 52 Labelled by Hicks A and B. The A-version is shorter than the B-version; Christine enlarged the dossier as the Querelle progressed. 53 Christine’s Querelle dossiers are now extant in: (A-version) BnF, MSS fr. 12779 and 604, Chantilly, Mus. Condé, MS 492 and Brussels, Bib. Roy., MS 9561; (B-version) the ‘Duke’s Manuscript’, acquired by Jean, Duc de Berry c. 1408–09 and now extant in five parts, BnF, MSS fr. 835, 606, 836, 605, 607 (BnF, MS fr. 835 contains the Querelle), the ‘Queen’s Manuscript’, compiled by Christine for Queen Isabeau of France c. 1410–11, now BL, MS Harley 4431, and Berkeley, Bancroft Lib., MS UCB 109. Five of these seven manuscripts are volumes of Christine’s collected works; only Brussels, Bib. Roy., MS 9561 and Berkeley, Bancroft Lib., MS UCB 109 are not, and are not from her scriptorium, although the versions of the Querelle that they transmit are clearly Christine’s, and must have ancestors in her manuscripts. All five collected Christine manuscripts except BnF, MS fr. 604 were copied under Christine’s own supervision, although BnF, MS fr. 604 was itself probably copied from one of Christine’s supervised collections; its content is identical to that of Chantilly, Mus. Condé, MS 492 (cf. Laidlaw, ‘Christine and the Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 243–45; Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. lxx–lxxxi; Christine de Pizan, Livre des epistres, ed. by Valentini, pp. 12–13). Berkeley, Bancroft Lib., MS UCB 109 — which was, intriguingly, copied by Gontier Col — contains only Christine’s B-version of the Querelle-documents (Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. lxxvii, see also p. xlvi n. 96 and Livre des epistres, ed. by Valentini, p. 11). 54 While all the above-mentioned manuscripts can be dated to the early- to mid-fifteenth century, Chantilly, Mus. Condé MS 492 has been dated more precisely to between 1399 and June 1402 (see Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 84). The Querelle was at its most heated throughout 1402 (see Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. lii–liv for complete chronology of contributions); the very early date of this manuscript demonstrates Christine’s eagerness to lay claim to the material of the Querelle at the earliest possible moment. 55 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 78. For an edition and discussion of Christine’s Querelle, see Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des epistres, ed. by Valentini.

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been extremely successful in laying claim to the Querelle. Six major manuscripts now embed her A or B-version of it into larger collections of her work, with one further manuscript (Berkeley, University of California Bancroft Library, MS 109) transmitting her B-version on its own in booklet form, while an alternative version is extant in only one manuscript, BnF, MS fr. 1563. Christine’s dossiers ‘essentially map her Querelle’; through publication of the documents Christine ‘created her own fictional Querelle de la Rose from which she emerged victorious’.56 The Querelle preserved in BnF, MS fr. 1563 presents quite a different picture, the dossier of letters being preserved alongside a copy of the Rose and Jean de Meun’s Testament. In order to introduce the Querelle dossier that she compiles for inclusion in her larger manuscripts, Christine composes two paratextual letters of introduction, one addressed to the queen of France and the other to the provost of Paris, Guillaume de Tignonville.57 These letters, although not part of the debate proper, nearly always appear prior to the Querelle letters themselves in Christine’s manuscripts, so that their content and presentation allow Christine to influence a reading of the debate that follows, and to posit an important, influential readership from the start.58 In the first letter to the queen, Christine appropriately emphasizes the side of the Querelle which appertains to the slander of women, ‘qui n’est chose loisible ne a souffrir ne soustenir’ (which should not be suffered or encouraged).59 Highlighting her ‘petite puissance’ (small power, incapacities)60 in the face of overwhelming opposition, she describes how she fights ‘par deffenses veritables contre aucunes oppinions a honnesteté contraires et aussi l’onneur et louenge des femmes’ (using true defences against certain dishonest opinions and also opinions which are against the honour and praise of women) because she knows ‘de certaine science leur bon droit estre digne de deffence [contre] leurs contraires et accusans’ (through certain experience/ knowledge that their right is worth defending against their enemies and accusers).61 Outside of the opening rubric, Christine does not mention either the names of the ‘accusans’ or, most importantly, the precise subject which they have been discussing; the letter does not contain a single mention of the Rose. Readers would presumably

56 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 83, 86. 57 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 5–8. 58 Compare Marilynn Desmond’s comments on Derridean notions of letter ‘destination’: ‘In addressing the Queen, Christine articulates an empowering “destination” for her critique of the Rose […] a destination that authorizes her rejection of the subject position he [Gontier Col] identifies for her’, ‘Ethics of Reading’, pp. 169–70. 59 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 6. 60 This is a tactic utilized frequently by Christine in the course of the Querelle; she thus pre-empts criticism of her inferior (female) intellect and capacities, or dismissal of her arguments on such grounds. 61 Personal experience and specifically feminine knowledge is evoked by Christine within the Querelle as justification for her negative views of the Rose, particularly where anti-feminism is concerned; see for example Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 139–40, in which she recounts a true story of a jealous husband beating his wife as a result of reading the Rose. This narrative serves as an example of Christine’s broader commitment to uncovering the very real impact of the Rose’s anti-feminism on women, who were situated outside of the clerical circles in which the Col brothers and their allies moved.

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have known that the debate was ‘sus le rommant de la rose’ because of the overall rubric given to the dossier at its opening; however, Christine’s letter to Queen Isabeau allows her to present her aims in a subtly different light, fighting with her ‘petit entendement’ on behalf of all women everywhere who are subject to generalized, widespread slander. Christine’s second introductory letter displays a similar attention to self-presentation. Again self-consciously excusing her ‘femmenine ignorance’ (feminine ignorance), Christine names both Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil, including their official positions, and appeals to Tignonville’s professional ‘office’ for judicial support in her cause, being ‘la plus foible partie’ (the weaker party, pp. 7-8). Her use of a legal expression to suit Tignonville’s position as provost of Paris, and her concomitant assertion of feebleness in fact attest to the assertiveness of her positioning. By identifying her ‘assailans’ professionally, she implicitly situates herself within their prestigious intellectual milieu, and through reference to Tignonville’s professional position she shows herself conversant with his, advertising her ability and fitness to debate with such men on equal grounds. As Brown-Grant suggests, Christine deliberately and strategically shifts both the grounds of the debate and the direction of the attack in her dedications to Tignonville and the queen: although in their letters it is clear that [the Rose’s defenders] […] felt themselves to be under attack from a disgruntled female reader of the Rose, the dedications added by Christine to copies of the first dossier […] create precisely the opposite impression. From being a debate centring on the defence of the Rose, the Querelle becomes the site of an energetic battle in defence of the female sex.62 While Christine presents herself as equal to the task of debating with the ‘prevost de Lille’ (the provost of Lille, Jean de Montreuil) and the ‘conseiller du roy’ (counsellor of the king, Gontier Col), the debate she presents to her readers is unashamedly unequal. In a series of short descriptions of the documents which began the Querelle, Christine mentions the first (now-lost) treatise of Jean de Montreuil in praise of the Rose, but does not include it in her collection of documents, nor does she describe any of his reactions to her arguments. This move allows her to present the debate as a ‘tit for tat’ argument between herself and Gontier, and this dynamic is all that the A-version of the Querelle in fact contains. Because Gontier apparently withdrew from the Querelle after having received a second letter from Christine, perhaps to make way for his brother Pierre, this strategy allows Christine to end her version of the Querelle with one of her own letters, resolutely confirming her opinion of the Rose. Gontier’s letters to Christine are short, perfunctory, often rather patronizing,63 and 62 Brown-Grant, Moral Defence of Women, p. 17. 63 Christine, indeed, takes the opportunity to describe Gontier as ‘inaniméz contre elle’ (furious with her), Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 9, hinting that this, rather than intellectual disagreement, is the motive behind his attack; such hints are perhaps justified by Gontier’s wholesale dismissal of her arguments on the grounds that she is merely ‘une femme passionee’ (an irate woman), Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 23. We might compare Jean de Montreuil’s famously vituperative assertion that in Christine ‘michi tamen audire visum est Leuntium grecam meretricem […] que “contra Theofrastum, philosophum tantum,

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do not engage in any depth with the terms of her objections to the Rose, objections which are fully and carefully set out in her first letter.64 Gontier, then, forms an ideal debating partner for the reading of the Querelle that she wishes to present to her readers. Similarly, to form the B-version of the Querelle, Christine simply adds to the A-version her long and extremely detailed response65 to Pierre Col’s intervention in the Querelle:66 Col’s intervention itself is omitted. Given that it constituted the most comprehensive and persuasive critique of Christine’s arguments to date, this omission is unsurprising; Christine was concerned not with producing an accurate record of the debate, but one which would most advantage her. Christine explicitly links her contributions to the Querelle to her wider corpus of pro-feminine literary work: ‘leur bon droit [est] digne de deffence […] comme cy appert et en autres miens dictiéz’ (their [women’s] rights merit defence, as I show here and in others of my works; my emphasis).67 Christine reiterates this position more forcefully in her letter to Jean de Montreuil, naming a text which she considers particularly relevant; ‘comme autrefoys ay dit sur ceste matiere en un mien dictié appellé L’epistre au dieu d’amours’ (as I have said elsewhere on this subject, in a text by me called the Epistre au dieu d’amours).68 This has an especially resonant effect given the Querelle-dossiers’ bibliographical placement: Christine’s Querelle is most often presented in volumes which, in fact, contain many of the ‘autres […] dictiez’ she has written. Readers are here subtly reminded that she has produced a larger body of work in defence of women, some of which will be located elsewhere in the same manuscript. In this way, she evokes a particular, pro-feminine intellectual and literary context to influence her readers’ approach to the Querelle, a context which is mirrored by the bibliographical make-up of the volumes which contain it. The Queen’s Manuscript, for example, contains the Epistre au dieu d’amours, the Livre de la cité des dames, and the Epistre Othéa as well as the Querelle-documents.69 This manuscript was, of course, especially conceived as a presentation copy for a particular woman, the queen of France, and features an opening presentation miniature depicting a

64 65 66 67

68 69

scribere ausa fuit”’ (I thought I heard the voice of the Leuntion the Greek whore who ‘dared to write against Theophrastus, the great philosopher’), Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 42–43. Christine re-interprets Leuntion positively in the Livre de la cité des dames, book i, 30, a reference which is explored by Schibanoff, ‘Taking the Gold out of Egypt’, p. 99. Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 11–22. Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 115–50; this is the longest single contribution to the Querelle. Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, pp. 89–112. Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 6. Brown-Grant emphasizes the importance of reading Christine’s pro-feminine work in a cohesive, ‘wider project’ (Moral Defence of Women, p. 3). She argues, moreover, that the Querelle ‘establishes the moral basis of her critique of misogyny’ which underpins her subsequent pro-feminine literary works (p. 5). Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 17. A detailed description of the manuscript and a full contents list has been provided by the AHRCfunded project ‘The Making of the Queen’s Manuscript’ [accessed 20 July 2009].

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female-only milieu for the handing over of the manuscript from Christine to Isabeau.70 Cayley has drawn attention to a comprehensive body of research which strongly suggests that Christine had a hand in the production, organization, and correction of her presentation volumes:71 she was clearly very well placed to appreciate the ways in which careful textual presentation could influence and direct interpretation. A secondary effect of Christine’s evocation of her other pro-feminine works is, of course, to advertise them, and, by extension, to advertise and shore up her own position as female vernacular author.72 As Cayley notes, as a woman and an author, it was a matter of vital importance that the misogynist attitudes expressed by characters in the Rose be brought into the public domain. In engaging with the Rose, Christine also stakes her claim in the wider Querelle des femmes.73 In so doing, she employs the Querelle du Roman de la rose as a means to engage with broader socio-literary concerns. Christine’s publication of the Querelle-documents, as Cayley has shown, ‘was quite alien to Montreuil and his colleagues’; usually, their engagement in literary debate such as the Querelle was a private rather than public activity, ‘an elaborate literary game’74 to be played out among a closed circle of participants. Christine’s unprecedented decision to publish her version of the Querelle, and her careful bibliographical tailoring of that version enables her to re-create herself as its author, situating it triumphantly amongst collections of her works. Her publication of the documents appears to have led to at least one of her adversaries withdrawing completely from the debate; Jean de Montreuil ceased to participate at all following Christine’s publication of the Querelle-documents. Indeed, in his final letter, Montreuil specifically mentions this publication, railing against all those who speak against Jean de Meun, ‘precipue […] Cristina, ut dehinc iam in publicum scripta sua ediderit’ (particularly Christine, who now presents her writings to the public).75 This mention of publication comes directly before Montreuil’s provocatively insulting comparison of Christine to Leuntion the Greek whore; it may well have been her assertive and self-authorizing publication of the Querelle-documents in particular which incensed him to such an extent. As Cayley documents, ‘there are conflicts between private and

70 BL, MS Harley 4431 (the Queen’s Manuscript), fol. 3r; on miniatures and patronage in the manuscript, see McGrady, ‘Benefactors and Authorship in Harley 4431’. All miniatures have been digitized and are accessible via the ‘Making of the Queen’s Manuscript’ website. 71 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 84 n. 141; p. 85 n. 147, see also the summary in Mews, ‘Latin Learning’, p. 63 n. 5. Compare Christine’s own mention by name of a particular, female master-illuminator, ‘Anastaise’, whom she apparently liked to hire to illustrate her manuscripts; Cité, book i, 41, discussed by Laidlaw, ‘Christine and the Manuscript Tradition’, pp. 239–40. 72 Christine’s use of the Querelle-documents is, of course, one of many strategies she developed to achieve such an aim; cf. Swift, Gender, Writing and Performance, pp. 184–88, esp. p. 187. 73 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 83–84. Christine’s engagement with the issue of safeguarding women’s reputations against male slander in particular plays into questions explored through the long-lasting Querelle des femmes; see Solterer, The Master and Minerva. 74 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 85. 75 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 42.

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public circulation’ of the Querelle; by staking a public claim to all the contributions, Christine ‘promote[s] herself to a prominent and [apparently] unassailable position’.76 At least one Querelle-reader, however, was not content to accept Christine’s version of the Querelle, nor to allow her an ‘unassailable position’ as the documents’ self-appointed editor and publisher. The creator of BnF, MS fr. 1563 presents a unique and wholly different Querelle to that of Christine, not only in terms of the documents that s/he includes,77 but also in terms of their presentation and layout. This manuscript, to which we shall now turn, shifts the focus away from Christine to give a much more even distribution of pro- and anti-Rose arguments from a range of participants, suggesting a reader who was primarily interested in the content and development of the Querelle, and, most importantly, the ways in which it might affect a reading of the Rose. BnF, MS fr. 1563, dated to the early fifteenth century, so roughly contemporary with most of the Querelle-manuscripts generated by Christine, is, indeed, perhaps best known for its copy of the Roman de la rose proper, which opens the manuscript, rather than its copy of the Querelle: the compiler of these texts clearly wished the Rose to be read in the context of Christine and Col’s arguments particularly, and to allow readers of the Querelle to contextualize the argument with reference to the Rose. As far as Col’s contribution to the Querelle is concerned, this remains the only extant manuscript of his letters, Christine having been careful to edit him out of her dossiers.78 The documents in the manuscript, therefore, span a wider and more inclusive range of opinions on the Rose than Christine allows for in her versions, the compiler allowing the debate between Christine and Col in particular to flourish without attempting to curtail or influence the discussion in favour of one or the other participant. What emerges is a compiler who was interested in the structure and dynamics of the debate, and in being able to follow precisely the arguments with which Col countered Christine and Gerson, and vice versa. The inclusion of both Christine’s first letter and Gerson’s Traité is necessary to understand Pierre Col’s ‘Response’ completely, as he makes extensive reference to both texts. Similarly, Christine’s second letter to Col both counters his ‘Response’ in detail and anticipates his next contribution. BnF, MS fr. 1563 is the only Querelle-manuscript in existence to integrate Gerson’s Traité into its chronological place in the Querelle;79 interest in the Querelle is focused overwhelmingly in this manuscript upon the ways in which the debate developed. The scribal presentation of the Querelle-texts in the manuscript supports this theory; very often certain words or phrases are copied in a textura-style script larger and much darker than the secretary script usually used by the scribe. These words tend 76 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 73. 77 Some of which are extant only in this manuscript. 78 In most manuscripts of the B-version of her Querelle, Pierre Col is mentioned in rubrics as the recipient of Christine’s added letter; his contributions, however, are not featured, see Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. lxi. 79 Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. lxv. Hicks gives a detailed description of the ‘tradition manuscrite gersonienne’ which also preserves the Traité, pp. lxv–lxix.

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to mark the beginning of a new phase of debate, or a turning-point to address a new argument;80 the script is also sometimes used to indicate a direct quotation from a previous letter.81 Clearly, the textura is deliberately placed so that a reader could navigate the numerous, intricate arguments made by Christine and Col in particular, and could easily situate themselves within the Querelle as it progressed. Within the manuscript, the Querelle is also frequently annotated with a series of scribally provided marginal nota or ‘take note!’ symbols, especially evident in Christine’s last letter. These nota symbols appear most often to signal Christine’s frequent rhetorical flourishes, flourishes which she uses to indicate horror and disagreement with Col, usually exclamatio or apostrophe.82 They not only record the reactions of one reader, the manuscript’s scribe, but also perform these reactions, actively shaping the interpretative responses and impulses of future readers.83 It is hard, now, to discern what type of response the scribe’s clustering of nota symbols around Christine’s rhetorical outbursts might condition. BnF, MS fr. 1563 clearly comes from a milieu close enough to Pierre Col to have access to copies of his letters, which were unavailable in Christine’s dossiers, and its compiler may, therefore, have been rather less than sympathetic to Christine’s involvement in the Querelle. The persistent focus on Christine’s obvious frustration and its carefully constructed expression could, in that case, look rather like a repeated and cumulative endorsement of Gontier Col’s misogynist dismissal of Christine as ‘une femme passionee’ (an irate woman). By highlighting it using an iterative visual system, the scribe draws readerly attention to the anger Christine expresses, anger which, Gontier has previously implied, invalidates her arguments as mere feminine spite. On the other hand, the compiler could equally well just be following the twists and turns of the debate, or indeed expressing admiration or approbation for Christine’s rhetorical and argumentative prowess and her commitment to engaging fully with Pierre. Pierre Col employs these forms of rhetoric much less frequently than Christine, in general; however, when he does, they too are usually marked, sometimes with textura and sometimes with a nota.84 Some nota symbols also appear in other places, for example used in a similar way to the textura to highlight the

80 Very often they coincide with Hicks’s modern division of each letter into paragraphs. 81 Examples include (textura in bold type): Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 95 (Col to Christine) ‘Mais venons a ce qui fait a ton propos’ (fol. 186v); p. 116 (Christine to Col), ‘Premierement tu proposses que’ (fol. 191r); p. 116 ‘une certainne mienne epistre […] laquelle se commense “Reverance et honneur”’ (fol. 191r). The occurrences of the word ‘responce’ to demarcate one cited argument from a second refuting it are also often in textura, e.g. Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 139 ‘“Quant en sont devenus hermittes?” Responce: et je te promet’ (fols 196r–v). 82 Examples include Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 131, ‘O homme, home deceu par oppinion volomptaire!’ (fol. 194v); p. 136, ‘Ha! Dieux! Que c’est maudit et mal raporté!’ (fol. 195v); p. 138 ‘Ha! Dieux! Come il appert que ta pure volenté aveugle ton bon scens’ (fol. 196r); ‘Ha! Livre mal nommé’ (fol. 196r); ‘Prenés les fort! Decevez-les! Vituperés-les! Assallés ce chastel!’ (fol. 196r). 83 On this relationship between annotation and reading, see Wakelin, ‘Instructing Readers’. 84 E.g. Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 102 (fol. 188v; bold type for textura, underlining for ‘nota’), ‘Ha! Dame Chasteté! Est-ce le louyer que vous voulés rendre a maistre Jehan de Meung? […] Voire comme entendement humain le puet concepvoir: n’en soubzriés ja!’

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beginning of a particular argument or counter-argument.85 Identical nota symbols are also employed in the margins of the Rose itself in BnF, MS fr. 1563,86 described by Huot as ‘indication that this manuscript was used for close study of the Rose’:87 the compiler used the same marginal annotating system for points of interest in the Rose, knitting together the act of reading the poem and the act of reading the debate both visually and conceptually. A comparison of Christine’s Querelle and that found in BnF, MS fr. 1563, then, shows two startlingly different approaches to the material. Christine was primarily concerned with streamlining, editing, and controlling the structure of the Querelle, in order to present herself as victor, and she favours a reading of the Querelle which emphasizes its implications for broad socio-literary issues concerning the textual representation of women and the combat against anti-feminism now collectively known as the Querelle des femmes. She presents it to her readers specifically in the context of her own pro-feminine works, both to highlight its relevance to this Querelle and to consolidate her own position as a professional female author. The presentation strategies employed by the compiler of BnF, MS fr. 1563 may be characterized as precisely the opposite. They show a distinct appreciation of the Querelle’s complex structure, and a desire to be fully conversant with all the arguments made. The manuscript also, of course, encourages its readers to approach the Querelle in the context of the Rose itself: a contest or debate about a text full of contest or debate. The varying manuscript presentation of the documents which make up the Querelle and of the Rose itself point to perhaps the single most important way in which interpretative contest is constructed and articulated by its participants: through the design and presentation of manuscript books. The focus of the following chapter is the Middle English translation of the Rose, the Romaunt of the Rose, and it begins with a detailed exploration of the manuscript presentation and critical reception of this text, before discussing ways in which that presentation might be contextualized as taking part in wider traditions of Rose-response.

85 For example, Christine de Pizan and others, Débat, ed. by Hicks, p. 133 (after a lengthy summary of Col’s argument signalled by textura at its opening), ‘Tu dis trop bien, ce te samble, et bien a propos’ (fol. 195r). 86 Found, for example, on BnF, MS fr. 1563, fols 9v, 16v, 17v, 24r. 87 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 158.

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Chapter 3

Translating the Rose

The Middle English Romaunt of the Rose is now extant in three different fifteenthand sixteenth-century copies. The first two of these are closely related: Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 409 (V.3.7) (hereafter ‘MS G’), a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript copy of the Romaunt, was used by William Thynne as copy text for his 1532 print of the Romaunt.1 This printed text was presented by Thynne as part of his Workes of Geffray Chaucer newly printed with diuerse workes which were neuer in print before (STC 5068; hereafter ‘Thynne 1532’).2 The third witness to the Romaunt is a single leaf from a now-lost manuscript, held in The National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, which Horobin has shown to be of a different textual tradition to MS G.3 The Glasgow manuscript of the Romaunt has, until now, received little critical attention. However, thanks to the important recent identification of its guild-artisan limner by Holly James-Maddocks, it can be accurately dated to c. 1430s–40s, and its place of production pinpointed to London’s Paternoster Row or its environs.4 MS G is copied by one scribe, on vellum, in black ink, and decorated by a single limner. It contains only the Romaunt, without attribution, copied in a single writing column in the centre of each folio. At certain points, it contains rubrication, and it features running titles in the top margins of particular folios. Its writing space leaves large margins which are frequently decorated throughout the manuscript with champ initials and floral borders, using a variety of colours.5 MS G is now missing eleven leaves, which were possibly present when Thynne used it for his 1532 edition, and its scribe has also left the odd line of the poem blank to be filled in at a later date: presumably the copy text did not contain these lines.





1 Blodgett, ‘Printer’s Copy’, pp. 98, 112. 2 Thynne 1532 contains a vast array of texts, some by Chaucer and some not. For a full list of the contents of Thynne’s edition, see the introduction to Skeat’s 1905 facsimile of the volume, The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Others. A more recent facsimile of a different witness to Thynne 1532 was published in 1974: The Works, ed. by Brewer. 3 See Horobin, ‘A New Fragment’. 4 Holly James-Maddocks, private communication, August 2012 and ‘Illuminators and their Scribes’; I am immensely grateful to her for sharing her work and discussing her findings with me in advance of publication. 5 Young and Aitken, Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum, no. 409 gives a full description of the manuscript, see also Mooney, Horobin, and Stubbs, Late Medieval English Scribes. For the manuscript’s provenance, prior to its arrival in Hunter’s collection, see Ker, William Hunter, pp. 8–9. On ‘champ’ initials, see Scott, ‘Limning and Book-Producing Terms’, pp. 145–58, and Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders.

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Blodgett has shown that, when printing the Romaunt, Thynne collated MS G with another text in order to fill the gaps left by MS G’s scribe, and to provide emendations for some of its readings.6 Until recently it was thought that this other text is most likely to have been a French-language copy of the Rose.7 However, the recent discovery of the third witness to the Romaunt, the single vellum leaf from another manuscript of a different family to MS G, has led Horobin to argue for a second, English-language version which could equally well have been used by Thynne in conjunction with MS G, to supply emendations.8 This leaf, which I term ‘MS E’, forms a valuable witness to the manuscript tradition of the Romaunt; in particular, it hints at a potentially greater diversity of manuscript presentation and of readership for the text than has hitherto been supposed. Horobin points out that David’s firm assertion that Thynne is ‘far likelier’ to have emended his Romaunt text with a French Rose than a different Romaunt manuscript is not, apparently, based on any compelling evidence: ‘it is not clear why this is the “far likelier” explanation’. Most interestingly, he goes on to note that ‘the fact that the only surviving manuscript was Thynne’s copy text has no doubt contributed to the sense that no other manuscripts were available’.9 The unarticulated ‘sense’ among critics which is here identified by Horobin — that the Romaunt was extremely limited in its circulation — gels extremely well with many recent critical approaches to the text, which often suggest, in tandem, that it had a very limited appeal to its contemporary readers.10 These approaches have focused overwhelmingly upon sidelining the Romaunt on the fringes of the Chaucer canon, and debating its relative merits — or, most often, demerits — as a Chaucer production. The fact that, until 2006, only one manuscript witness to the Romaunt was known to exist may well have reinforced the scholarly consensus that the Romaunt is, indeed, a partial example of Chaucer’s tentative ‘apprentice work’, hailing from an ‘early period’ in his career, of lesser literary value than his other works — and that it was understood as such (and thus not sought after) by



6 Blodgett, ‘William Thynne and his 1532 Edition of Chaucer’, p. 139. It is usually assumed that the Glasgow manuscript had yet to lose its eleven folios when Thynne used it, so that his text can be employed, for the purposes of editions, as a largely accurate guide to what they contained; see for example the digitized version of the manuscript, where the appropriate sections of Thynne’s printed edition have been used to supply the missing folios: [accessed 20 August 2012]. 7 Compare, for example, David’s comments prefacing his textual notes to the Romaunt in Riverside, pp. 1198–99: according to David, it is ‘far likelier’ that Thynne emended with ‘the aid of the French original’ than with a different manuscript of the Middle English translation. 8 See Horobin, ‘A New Fragment’, for a description of this leaf and full discussion. 9 Horobin, ‘A New Fragment’, p. 212. 10 For a recent articulation of this general scholarly assumption that the Romaunt was limited in its circulation, see Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, p. 74 and Knox, ‘Romance of the Rose’, p. 239. Warren calls on us to question the very bases on which we use assumptions about circulation to assign critical value to texts: an ‘influential production’ is a text with ‘progeny’, whereas ‘a text that “leads nowhere”, surviving only in one manuscript, seems inherently less important’, ‘Translating English Literary History’, p. 499.

Translat i ng t he Rose

an early reading public.11 The fact that at least one other manuscript of a different textual family evidently existed alongside MS G during the fifteenth century suggests otherwise, however: clearly, the circulation of the Romaunt was rather less limited than has been previously thought. MS E also provides evidence of diversity in artistic presentation of the text in manuscript form, a fact which reinforces the idea that the Romaunt potentially had a variety of readers with different budgets, agendas, and aesthetic requirements. MS G is a beautifully executed and extensively decorated manuscript, with a series of elaborately painted borders, initials, and some rubrication. It probably also contained at least one miniature or piece of more extensive decoration; the opening folio of MS G is now missing; a feature which may suggest that a miniature, or otherwise lavishly decorated opening page, has been lifted from the manuscript. The opening folio appears to have contained four lines fewer of verse than would be expected in this manuscript; an illumination could account for this space.12 MS E, on the other hand, from the evidence of the single leaf which survives, possibly had a less prestigious and expensive decorative scheme. Here, textual division appears to have been — as far as can be ascertained — marked not with illuminated borders or champs completed by an artisan limner, but with more simple coloured pen and ink decoration of selected capital letters. The one decorated capital which remains in MS E is simply ‘in blue ink decorated with red penwork’.13 In this chapter, I will argue for the importance of these material witnesses to the Romaunt. MS G in particular, I will suggest, is central to a consideration of its role and function as an English translation of the Rose. Consideration of The Romaunt as a translation of the Rose will also interrogate widespread critical dissatisfaction with it as a deficient or unsophisticated Chaucer production. In what follows, I hope to reconceptualize the Romaunt, removing it from its habitual critical situation as a minor, early, and incomplete Chaucer text. I will consider it first and foremost as a Rose-translation, and will, therefore, view it in relation to wider traditions of Rose-reception. I will also identify relationships with Chaucer which extend beyond questions of authorship and attribution to him: focus on obtaining a definitive

11 David, Riverside, p. 1104. We could compare Knox’s conclusion that the Romaunt as a whole is ‘another piece of fifteenth-century Chauceriana, a failed attempt to continue a fragmentary translation that was at least believed to be by Chaucer’, ‘Romance of the Rose’, p. 238, my emphasis. I return to the question of the Romaunt’s multiple translators and its ‘fragments’ later in this chapter. 12 MS G also contains some holes where decorated initials have been individually cut out, suggesting an earlier owner interested in removing attractive decorative features, e.g. at fol. 131r. It also contains one folio (fol. 57v) which boasts considerably more decoration than any others now in the manuscript, perhaps evidence that other similarly highly decorated folios existed among the eleven which are no longer present. 13 Horobin, ‘A New Fragment’, p. 206. Employing initials executed in red and blue penwork, sometimes of different sizes, is a common method of decoration and textual division in French Rose-manuscripts. It can be seen (using varying degrees of decorative ornateness) in e.g. BnF, MSS fr. 1573, 2195, 19154 and Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 2988. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the manuscript did not also contain much more elaborate decoration which is now lost: this is the case in Arsenal 2988, for example, which contains both pen and ink capitals and a series of miniatures.

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answer to these questions, I suggest, has obscured the work the Romaunt does as Rose-translation and has hampered critical efforts to explore this work. In what follows, my own position on authorship might best be defined as neutral: I propose, in fact, to put aside deliberately ‘answering’ the question of Chaucer authorship, and, instead, to seek consciously for other pathways into understanding the poem as translation.

The Fragmented Romaunt I want to begin by investigating the critical reception of the Romaunt to date, in order to substantiate some of the claims about negative and reductive critical attitudes to it that I have made so far in this chapter. In order to do this, I will focus on a single key term which has consistently been applied to the Romaunt since the mid- to late nineteenth-century work of scholars attempting to disentangle the question of the translator’s identity, or identities.14 This term is ‘fragment’, and it has been used since the nineteenth century by almost all critics and editors of the Romaunt without exception to refer to different parts or sections of the text, sections which reflect evidence of changes in translator as the text progresses, and which also reflect the fact that roughly five thousand lines of the Rose are apparently omitted from the translation at the transition between one translator and another. Habitually, three translators are posited for the text, which is thus divided into three ‘fragments’: A, B, and C. ‘Fragment A’ comprises the first 1705 lines of the Romaunt, ‘Fragment B’ comprises ll. 1706 to 5810, while ‘Fragment C’ runs from l. 5811 to l. 7692, the end of the Middle English text as we have it. In terms of translating the Rose, however, the Romaunt’s three sections do not simply translate the material which comprises the first 7690-odd lines of the French text. A begins at the opening of the poem, and B follows directly on from A. Thus A and B together give a translation of Rose ll. 1–c. 5154. C, however, does not follow directly from B, but picks up the translation of the Rose after a roughly five-thousand-line break, at Rose c. l. 10,680.15 In sum, textual evidence for these changes in translator is found primarily in three areas: lexis, dialect, and Rose-manuscript tradition. (I will return to this evidence in more detail in the course of this chapter, but will outline it briefly here for clarity.) The shift from A to B is marked by a change in the Middle English word used consistently

14 Dahlberg gives a comprehensive summary of the long-running nineteenth-century discussions which focus on isolating, testing, and interpreting textual and metrical evidence which would suggest more than one translator, and would establish (or not) the identity of one of these putative translators as Chaucer, The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, pp. 5–24. 15 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland juxtaposes the Romaunt in parallel text format with relevant sections of the Rose. This edition is based upon Thynne 1532, with some variant readings from MS G given in textual notes, probably because Sutherland believed that MS G was not Thynne’s copy text, and that Thynne had access to a far superior manuscript, now lost, on which he based his edition (introduction, p. ix). Blodgett’s work has, however, since shown conclusively that Sutherland was incorrect in this assumption (cf. n. 1). Riverside provides the Romaunt-text as it is found in MS G, and a transcription can also be found as part of the Glasgow digitization project.

Translat i ng t he Rose

to translate a key item of vocabulary, and by a move to conspicuously Northern dialectal forms. The shift from B to C is again marked by a change in a repeated item of vocabulary, and by fewer Northern forms.16 Furthermore, Sutherland has suggested that different manuscript families of the Rose were used to give the source text of the Romaunt at different points: he has argued that at least two Rose-manuscript families, H and R, provide the core sources of the Romaunt, with an H-manuscript being used as a source for Section A, and an R-manuscript for sections B and C.17 The evidence, then, is complex and rather contradictory. Many critics have linked A and C together on the grounds that neither exhibit the conspicuously Northern forms found in B, and have suggested that they could conceivably be by the same translator.18 However, the evidence outlined by Sutherland suggests that, in terms of source text, logically it is B and C, rather than A and C, which could be linked: both appear to derive from the R-manuscript family of the Rose, while A — according to Sutherland — has more in common with readings from a different family. However, B and C are separated by dialect, certain lexical choices, and a five thousand-line narrative break. It seems to be awareness of this narrative break which initially led to the term ‘fragment’ being applied to the Romaunt. Dahlberg describes how ‘the scholarship of the 1870s and 1880s comes to refer to two fragments, the one before the large gap and the one after’,19 and it appears that the term ‘fragment’ derived from a sense that two (or more) incomplete manuscript fragments must have been joined to produce the text as it is copied into MS G. Lindner, for example, suggested in 1887 that MS G was copied from two manuscript fragments, one containing A+B (which had not yet been differentiated from one another), and one C.20 Skeat elaborated on this theory considerably, proposing that A and C both originally existed and circulated in independent manuscript ‘fragments’, and that C was originally translated and circulated as a ‘stand-alone’ poem before being later incorporated into an incomplete translation of the Rose.21 C comprises the God of Love’s discussion with the character Fauls Semblant, Fauls Semblant’s adherence to the God of Love’s cause, and the encounter of Fauls Semblant and Abstinence Contrainte with Malebouche. As it now stands, C ends as Fauls Semblant is preparing to hear Malebouche’s confession, just before he and his companion seize this opportunity to cut Malebouche’s throat. This moment was obviously considered important or climactic in narrative terms by 16 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, p. xi, Riverside, p. 1103, and Horobin, Language of the Chaucer Tradition, pp. 139–40. 17 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, pp. xvi–xxxiv. Alfred David discusses the limitations of some of Sutherland’s theories about the text of the Romaunt, most particularly his suggestion that a reviser may have worked on the text: David, Review, esp. pp. 668–69. 18 For a full summary of scholarly positions taken on authorship of the Romaunt, and potential links between Sections A, B and C, see The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, pp. 3–24. 19 Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, p. 5. 20 Lindner, ‘Die englische Übersetzung’. Lindner proposes two different translators for the two parts of the Romaunt, A+B and C (pp. 163, 172–73), and suggests that at least two manuscripts lie behind MS G (p. 167). 21 See Skeat, ‘The Three Fragments’, p. 137 and Chaucer Canon, pp. 92–93. The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, p. 50 offers further discussion.

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readers and decorators of Rose-manuscripts: in many illuminated Rose-manuscripts I have examined, it is provided with an image depicting the act.22 C’s abrupt end just prior to this climactic scene (whether it circulated as a stand-alone piece about Fauls Semblant or not) may, therefore, suggest that some material has been lost from its close.23 Despite the long and distinguished history of the term ‘fragment’, coined by the earliest Romaunt-scholars, it appears to have been used, then and now, without much critical reflection. In order to discuss the Romaunt’s division into three, I suggest that the more neutral terms ‘section’ or ‘part’ should be preferred to ‘fragment’ for a number of reasons. On a purely practical level, the term ‘fragment’ can lead to misconceptions about material witnesses, particularly MS G. Within medieval studies, the term ‘fragment’ is most conventionally used about remnants of books: physical ‘fragments’ of dismembered or otherwise incomplete codices.24 Speaking of ‘Fragment A’ can give rise to the assumption that we are dealing with manuscript fragments of the text. However, in codicological terms, MS G is actually largely complete — in the sense that it is not unfinished, it is made up of a series of quires, each equipped with appropriate catchwords to ensure binding in the correct order, and it boasts a deliberate, planned, and well-executed decorative scheme involving collaboration between scribe and limner.25 As I have noted, it is now missing eleven folios, although the probability that at least some of these have been cut from the manuscript because of their decorative quality is high. There is also evidence of misplaced leaves in quires 19 and 20, as several chunks of text are transcribed out of order. However, as the resultant breaks in sense sometimes occur mid-folio, the disordering of leaves must have occurred in MS G’s exemplar, to be copied by the G-scribe.26 There is, then, no reason to consider MS G as codicologically ‘fragmented’ or incomplete. Crucially, there is also no reason to assume that the scribe of MS G

22 See, for example, the historiated initial in Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS gall. qu. 80, fol. 94v, or the illumination in BnF, MS fr. 9345, fol. 35v. 23 Both MS G and Thynne 1532 display awareness that the Romaunt is potentially missing some material from its end; the text closes rather abruptly in both witnesses. Thynne discards the final line of the text in MS G, and then translates four further lines not present in the manuscript to bring the final sentence to a close (see Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, l. 7691 and note). MS G appears to have had some lines erased after the end of the text on fol. 150r, although what these contained is now impossible to make out. Beneath this erasure, what looks like the scribal hand has written ‘Explicit’ in the bottom margin. Fol. 150r appears to be the beginning of a new quire (signalled by a catchword on fol. 149v), which perhaps suggests that the scribe hoped for or expected more material; however, although this folio’s margins have been ruled to the bottom of the folio in the usual way, the verso has not been prepared for writing, nor have the following leaves, from what can be seen of what remains. 24 Convenient examples are found in Brownrigg and Smith, eds, Interpreting and Collecting Fragments. It is fragments of this nature that Skeat and Lindner both imply form the basis of MS G, or its ancestor. For a similar argument about the inaccuracy of the term ‘Fragment’ when used to describe the textual division of the Canterbury Tales in its surviving manuscript form, see Meyer-Lee, ‘Abandon the Fragments’, esp. pp. 49–50 and 76. 25 James-Maddocks argues that the scribe, although unidentified, was very probably a member of the same Paternoster Row guild as the manuscript’s limner, since guild-artisans were bound by their guild ordinances to work with other guild members; private communication, August 2012. 26 See The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, pp. 48–50 on the disordering.

Translat i ng t he Rose

knew, or cared about, differences in translator or narrative ‘gaps’ between sections: the Romaunt is presented in the manuscript as one, continuous piece. Indeed, MS G bears traces of two different attempts at regular foliation in the bottom right-hand corners of its leaves (some of which are now partially or totally trimmed away), and one of which appears to be earlier than the other. Quire 4, for example, retains both series of marks, the earlier using a minuscule (‘d i’, ‘d ii’, etc.) and the later a capital. The earlier foliator who uses minuscule letter forms also leaves traces in quire 5 (‘e i’, ‘e ii’, etc.), and quire 7 (‘g’). These marks provide further evidence that care has been taken to put the leaves in the right order and to ensure correct binding. The term ‘fragment’ has been consistently used about the Romaunt to refer to its differences in translator, and the narrative gap of roughly five thousand lines between B and C, rather than to any material features of MS G or Thynne 1532. This is a decision that has not been without ideological consequences. It encodes — and perpetuates — an overwhelming focus on two related ways of viewing the Romaunt, both negative. The first emphasizes the ‘fragmented’ nature of the text as a translated poem: stress is laid on its incompleteness and insufficiency as adequate or ‘whole’ rendering of the Rose. Skeat, for example, explains that ‘Le Roman is of portentous length […] but The Romaunt is imperfect’ (my emphasis).27 Again and again, the label ‘fragmentary’ is attached to the text: it is routinely described as a ‘fragmentary translation of Le Roman’,28 or, more revealingly, a ‘fragmentary translation’ of ‘the most popular and influential secular poem of the late Middle Ages’.29 Benson’s comment (like Skeat’s before him) implicitly contrasts the superlative popularity and influence of the Rose on the one hand, with the distressingly incomplete state of its English translation on the other. The Romaunt can only ever be lacking — in narrative content, in influence, in ‘completeness’ — when compared to the Rose. The parallel-text format of Sutherland’s edition emphasizes this putatively ‘fragmentary’ nature of the Romaunt: not only are ‘Fragments A, B and C’ clearly marked off within the edition, but sections of the Rose for which there is no line-for-line correspondence with the Romaunt-text are usually given in full, resulting in a Romaunt that is apparently peppered with textual lacunae of various sizes. Similarly, sections of the Romaunt for which no corresponding Rose lines apparently exist are presented facing a gap in the Rose’s text. However, as Sutherland notes, the text of the Rose which he produces for his edition to contextualize the Romaunt in fact does not survive in any single manuscript: it is a mixture of several different versions or recensions of the Rose, chosen because they best reflect the Middle English translation at particular points.30

27 Skeat, Chaucer Canon, pp. 65–66. 28 Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’, p. 155. 29 Benson, Riverside, p. 685. Compare also Kamath’s rueful comment that ‘Only fragments survive of the Rose translation associated with Chaucer’, Authorship and Allegory, p. 74. 30 See the explanation given by Sutherland in Romaunt/Roman, introduction, pp. xvi–xxxiii. Briefly, Sutherland, using Langlois’s classification of many Rose-manuscripts into a series of families, suggests the indebtedness of the Romaunt to manuscripts from more than one Rose-family or recension. For Rose-families, see Langlois, Les Manuscrits and Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers.

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I shall return to the implications of Sutherland’s findings concerning the source of the Romaunt in different recensions of the Rose later in this chapter. Here, however, I want to emphasize the fact that — as has been shown by much recent Rose-scholarship, which has built on Ernest Langlois’s seminal research — Le Roman de la rose is not a monolithic textual entity, but rather a fluctuating and variable group of manuscript families, some of which are substantially different from others, and all of which constitute varied interpretative responses to the text.31 Indeed, at the most basic level the conjoined Rose is built upon the conscious exploitation and enjoyment of textual and narrative ‘incompleteness’ as a theme. As we saw in Chapter 2, Jean de Meun overtly sets himself up as continuator of a pre-existent and unfinished work, and many other readers apparently perceived this as an invitation to ‘join in’ in their turn. This being the case, setting up a ‘fragmentary’ English translation in contrast to a whole or complete Rose is surely a false dichotomy. Contextualizing the Romaunt codicologically with the Rose demonstrates the extent to which dismissing it as somehow unsatisfactorily incomplete as a translation appears to show a certain unwillingness to engage with the complex transmission history of the French text. Since the pioneering work of Langlois, followed by Huot in particular, no-one suggests that manuscripts of the Rose belonging to the B-family, for example, are somehow deficient or fragmentary versions of a text that ‘should’ have been transmitted complete. Nor do we conceptualize Gui de Mori as having produced an ‘incomplete’ or ‘fragmentary’ version of the Rose. Rather, the manuscripts preserving this, and other recensions of the Rose are grouped and studied for their important interpretative responses to the poem.32 Indeed, in what follows, I will suggest that the some of the ‘gaps’ in the Romaunt (particularly the five thousand Rose lines posited as ‘missing’ between sections B and C of the text) may be very profitably recontextualized by comparison with the French Rose manuscript tradition, particularly with the B-manuscripts. The second way of viewing the Romaunt encoded in the term ‘fragment’ is an enduring critical focus on cementing the precise division of the text into discrete blocks according to changes in translator, a goal which has been pursued to the exclusion of virtually all other areas of enquiry. Inevitably, the focus has moved swiftly from accurate division to secure attribution, most particularly Chaucer attribution: which ‘fragment’ is all that is left of a Chaucer translation of the Rose? Which should we be isolating as ‘Chaucer’s work’? Skeat’s approach to the question, in the course of his critical studies of Chaucer, reveals a great deal about the prominence quickly acquired by this area of investigation, and about the developing desire to attribute part of the Romaunt to Chaucer, a desire that has remained influential to the present day. While in 1884 Skeat reiterated firmly his opinion that none of the Romaunt was

31 I am thinking in particular here of work by David Hult, Lori Walters, and, of course, Sylvia Huot: Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies; Walters, ‘Gui de Mori’s Rewriting of Faux Semblant’, ‘The Rose as Sign’, ‘The Tournai Rose’; Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers. 32 See, most recently and influentially, Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers (chap. 4 on B-manuscripts) and ‘Medieval Readers of the Roman de la Rose’, and Brook, ‘The Pruned Rose’.

Translat i ng t he Rose

by Chaucer,33 only four years later he leant towards Chaucer authorship for what is today usually termed ‘Fragment C’: ‘if any part […] [of the Romaunt] is by Chaucer it is [this] […] and even against this I believe something (yet much less [than against the rest of the translation]) can be urged’.34 However, when Kaluza also differentiated ‘Fragment A’ from ‘Fragment B’ at around l. 1704 in 1890, arguing that Chaucer translated ‘Fragments’ A and C but not B, he sparked off a process of consultation and cooperation with Skeat which eventually caused Skeat to change his mind again.35 During the 1890s, Skeat shifted his Chaucer attribution to A, writing rather breezily in 1900 that ‘there is no real difficulty accepting this Fragment as genuine […] we may as well at once accept it’.36 It appears that Skeat became increasingly keen to identify at least one section of the Romaunt as ‘Chaucer’s’ — even if the arguments for which section were subject to change.37 The overwhelming urge to attribute some part of the Romaunt to Chaucer is a feature of many nineteenth-century engagements with it; Furnivall, for example, writes emotively in 1868 of this desire: ‘I, for one, am not prepared to give up the Romaunt as Chaucer’s without a fight — willingly as I let go […] other poems [such as The Flower and the Leaf]’ from the canon.38 Furnivall was evidently deeply frustrated by the ambiguous critical position of The Romaunt in relation to Chaucer, and the inevitable inconclusivity of the conflicting arguments which raged both for and against its genuineness as Chaucer production. ‘Can’t some one’, he exclaims in 1871 ‘find a MS of Chaucer’s version, with his name to it and his power in it, and so decide the question for us?’39 Furnivall’s vision of the perfect Romaunt-manuscript, waiting to be discovered, expresses clearly his desire to see attribution to Chaucer placed beyond all scholarly doubt: he imagines 33 Skeat, ‘Why the Romaunt of the Rose Is Not Chaucer’s’. This is a reprint of an 1880 article by Skeat: ‘Note on The Romaunt of the Rose’, originally printed in The Prioresses Tale, ed. by Skeat. 34 Chaucer: The Minor Poems, ed. by Skeat, pp. xxiv–xxv. Skeat is here responding specifically to the hints published by Lindner in 1887 (‘Die englische Übersetzung’, p. 166) that Chaucer might well have been the translator of Sections A+B, then thought of as a single, continuous ‘Fragment’ by one individual, and termed ‘A’. The section of the Romaunt that is now termed ‘C’ was at this stage, therefore, designated ‘B’. 35 Kaluza first published his findings on the division between his Fragments A and B in an open letter to Furnivall in 1890, transcribed in full by Dahlberg in The Romaunt, p. 8 (and first published in The Academy, 5 July 1890, pp. 11–12). He elaborated on these findings, and on the connection he perceived between A and C, in Chaucer und der Rosenroman: A and C ‘sind […] bruchstücke derselben übersetzung […] kein anderer als Chaucer die fragmente A und C geschrieben haben kann’ (p. 13). Dahlberg writes that ‘it is clear that Skeat and Kaluza were in close touch during the early 1890s’ on the question of textual division in the Romaunt (The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, p. 8). 36 Chaucer Canon, p. 66. In his earlier ‘Postscript on the Romaunt of the Rose’ Skeat also expressed the opinion that Fragment A was ‘originally Chaucerian’ (see The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, p. 9). This was published in Marshall Lagarrigue and Porter, Ryme-Index to the Minor Poems. Dahlberg notes that although the publication date of this book is 1887, Skeat’s comments on the Romaunt must postdate 1890, as they refer to Kaluza’s letter to Furnivall of that year. 37 The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, pp. 3–24 gives an extended discussion of such fluctuations in attribution to Chaucer; Skeat was, of course, by no means the only scholar interested in proving Chaucer authorship for part of the poem. 38 Furnivall, A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition, p. 110. 39 Furnivall, Trial-Forewords, p. 7.

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a manuscript which conveniently proclaims Chaucer authorship, but which also contains a text that is worthy of Chaucer, displaying clearly to all readers ‘his power’ as a poet. Chaucer’s poetic ‘power’ exerts a pressure on the Romaunt despite the unfortunate lack of a manuscript proclaiming his authorship: this pressure is also evident in Skeat’s post-1890 work on the text. Chaucer-attribution forms a key factor in many of the decisions and assertions made by Skeat. In The Chaucer Canon, for example, he describes the methods by which ‘Fragment A’ could be divided precisely from ‘Fragment B’ at l. 1705. As more general evidence for the existence of a shift between A and B, Kaluza had noted that a different Middle English word suddenly begins to be used to translate the frequently used French term ‘bouton’ (rose-bud). Initially, the term is consistently translated by ‘knoppe’, but there is a change to ‘botoun’.40 The final use of ‘knoppe’ comes at l. 1702, and the first use of ‘botoun’ at l. 1721, so a change in translator, logically, most probably took place at some point between these lines. Skeat fixed on l. 1705 as the point at which A stopped, and l. 1706 as B’s opening line: The swote smelle spronge so wide That it dide al the place aboute Whanne I hadde smelled the sauour swote No will hadde I fro thens yit goo.41

1704 1705 1706 1707

The reasoning by which he did so is revealing. Line 1705 was apparently arrived at as the obvious moment of transition by means of a prior assumption that Chaucer was the author of the initial section of the Romaunt, A, and a subsequent search for ‘bad’ or anomalous poetic or translational practice which would indicate that his hand was no longer to be discerned: At the end of l. 1705 we have a complete dislocation in sense. The sentence begins with ‘That it dide al the place aboute’ [l. 1705], then comes to a sudden end […] l. 1706 starts a new sentence and at the same time exhibits a non-Chaucerian […] false rime. […] He [the B-translator] ought to have been [more] careful.42 More recent editors have followed Skeat in these suggestions. Riverside, for example, notes that: ‘Fragment A is generally thought to break off here [l. 1705] in mid-sentence, and the following line, which fails to complete the sense and makes a false rhyme [aboute/swote], is attributed to the author of B’.43 In point of fact, Skeat’s suggestion that there is a dislocation in sense between ll. 1705–06 does not, necessarily, hold water. For l. 1705 surely does not have to be the beginning of a sentence as Skeat

40 Compare, for example, Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, ll. 1691, 1702, 1721, and 1786. The term used to translate the name of the character ‘Bel Acueil’ similarly differentiates B and C: in B the name is given as ‘Bialacoil’ (e.g. ll. 2984, 2999), while in C ‘Fayre-Welcomyng’ is used (e.g. ll. 5856, 7639). 41 I cite from MS G, fol. 32v. 42 Skeat, Chaucer Canon, pp. 77–79. Skeat also discusses l. 1705 as the transition point from A to B in ‘The Three Fragments’. 43 Riverside, p. 1107, note to l. 1705.

Translat i ng t he Rose

claims; the word ‘that’ here refers back to the wide-springing of the ‘swote smell’ in l. 1704. Skeat assumes the verb ‘dide’ to be the past participle of ‘to do’ (i.e. modern English ‘did’), suggesting that a second verb is missing from the sentence (e.g. ‘that it did fill’, ‘that it did spread’). However, MED glosses this usage of ‘dide’ as the past participle of the verb ‘deien’: literally ‘to dye’, figuratively ‘to permeate’.44 If this be the case, then the sense is surely not impaired, and the sentence simply ends at l. 1705, with l. 1706 being the start of a new sentence. This reading also fits much better with the construction used in the corresponding French lines, which likewise have the sweetness as subject and the area round about as direct object of the verb: ‘La soatume […] tote la place replenist’ (ed. by Sutherland, vv. 1669–70; the sweet odour filled all the area around). What I mean to question here is not necessarily the shift in translator from ll. 1705–06 — such a shift presumably took place in the space of twenty lines, and it is perfectly possible that it happened here — but the overwhelming focus on Chaucer, and his ‘ideal’ poetic practice, as a method of pinpointing that shift. In Skeat and Riverside’s readings, both the supposed break in sense and the ‘false, un-Chaucerian’ rhyme are attributed to the B-translator, who is thus implicitly conceptualized as failing in his task of picking up where Chaucer left off, both in terms of understanding how to complete Chaucer’s sentence grammatically and semantically, and of replicating his end of line rhymes. It is this failure to measure up to a perceived Chaucer standard which decides the question of textual division. Of the B-translator, Skeat revealingly comments that he did not, of course, know that he would be ‘mistaken for Chaucer’ by critics of the Romaunt.45 If he had, Skeat implies, he might have tried a bit harder; as it is his ‘pretensions’ are easily differentiated from Chaucer’s superior poetic production.46 Following on from Skeat’s final position on the Romaunt and attribution,47 the scholarly consensus at present seems still to be that Chaucer is almost definitely the translator of A, certainly not the translator of B, and possibly the translator of C. As noted previously, B exhibits Northern dialectical forms, which, it is argued, render Chaucer authorship unlikely, while there appears to be some disagreement as to the features of C. Sutherland argues for the same Northern translator as B, on stylistic grounds, and also on the grounds that both appear to share a common Rose-manuscript source. Li, however, in the wake of Feng’s work, situates C alongside A on metrical grounds,

44 MED deien, v., sense (e); Romaunt is the only citation given in MED. Thynne 1532’s spelling of this problematic word potentially supports this reading: at l. 1705, it reads ‘that it dyed al the place aboute’, suggesting that Thynne and/or Godfray, his typesetter, may well have read the verb ‘to dye’ rather than ‘to do’ here. OED gives several example citations of verb ‘to dye’ dating from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries which show variation between spelling ‘deyen’ and ‘deien’, see OED dye, v.1, esp. senses 1a and 1b. 45 Skeat, Chaucer Canon, p. 79. 46 Skeat, Chaucer Canon, p. 75. 47 And in spite of several approaches to the Romaunt which argued on varying grounds that Chaucer wrote all or none of it: see Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, pp. 16–20, esp. on the publications of Koch, Lounsbury, and Brusendorff.

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claiming Chaucer authorship for both.48 Simon Horobin has recently suggested that a completely new assessment of the authorship of the Romaunt should be made.49 Horobin argues that the London dialect of the fourteenth century in fact included Northern forms, positing a ‘greater diversity of London English and Chaucer’s dialect than [has been] allowed for in the work of earlier critics’.50 This could point towards a non-Northern author, indeed, possibly the same author, for B and C as well as A.51 It does not, however, explain the differences in key vocabulary which exist between the sections, and which still indicate a possible change in translator,52 nor does it explain Sutherland’s finding that a completely different Rose-manuscript family was used as the source for A from that used as the source for B and C. Recent critical discussions of the poem almost without exception take the question of Chaucer authorship as their starting point: the ‘fragment’ of the poem presumed to be by Chaucer is, apparently, the only part worth discussing. The opening remarks of one of the most recent articles to be published on the Romaunt give a clear indication of the prevalent critical bias towards A, a bias which is obviously dependent upon the assumption that Chaucer is its author. Jordi Sanchez-Martí asserts that ‘Chaucer’s translation of the Romance of the Rose represents his first significant literary endeavour […] consensus has been reached in attributing to Chaucer Fragment A […] this paper only concerns itself with Fragment A’.53 Caroline Eckhardt’s influential 1986 article on the Romaunt deals exclusively with A, and for precisely the same reasons: ‘recent editors have hesitated to accept as Chaucer’s anything more that the A fragment’.54 It is evident here that A is habitually singled out for examination solely because of its putative relationship to Chaucer. Stephanie Viereck Gibbs Kamath’s recent study similarly restricts itself to examining ‘Fragment A’ as evidence of Chaucer’s ‘direct translation from the Rose’.55 Kamath seeks specifically to isolate evidence of Chaucer’s engagement with the Rose through translation as part of her wider arguments about the ways in which his engagement with it shaped his poetic practice. Citing the evidence put forward by Feng, she restricts herself to A.56 However, Feng in fact also suggests that C should be considered as by Chaucer, a position recently reiterated by Li.57 Kamath does not explain why she accepts A but

48 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, p. xxxii, Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’, p. 177, and Feng, ‘Chaucer and the Romaunt of the Rose’. 49 See Horobin, Chaucer Tradition, pp. 139–40. 50 Private communication; I am grateful to Simon Horobin for his discussion of this point with me. 51 A suggestion recently reiterated by Seymour, who finds that the ‘language of the underlay of the translation’ is ‘homogenous’ in all three sections, and suggests, therefore, that all three were composed by the same individual, and that that individual is Chaucer, ‘Chaucer’s Rose’, p. 35. 52 Seymour would explain the shift from ‘knoppe’ to ‘botoun’ as a deliberate decision taken on semantic and artistic grounds: ‘like the bud, the “botoun” unfolds with the poem’, ‘Chaucer’s Rose’, p. 35. He does not, however, offer a similar explanation for the shift from ‘Bialacoil’ to ‘Fayre-Welcomyng’. 53 Sanchez-Martí, ‘Chaucer’s “makyng”’, pp. 217 and 218 n. 2. 54 Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation’, p. 42. 55 Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, pp. 73–75. 56 Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, p. 74 n. 40. 57 Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’.

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not C on Feng’s evidence; her decision to do so is representative of the wider sense which seems to prevail amongst Chaucer scholars that accepting A as Chaucer’s is now the status quo from which no-one is really prepared to deviate. As early as 1906, A. D. Schoch argued extremely presciently that the acceptance of A as Chaucer’s and the rejection of B and C was less to do with compelling evidence either way than with a sense that this decision formed a convenient ‘middle ground’ between acceptance of all sections versus acceptance of none.58 This is a middle ground on which much current criticism still stands. The authorship debate, closely linked to the division of the Romaunt into separate ‘fragments’, has been the principal, if not the only, strand of criticism produced about the text for decades; as Eckhardt points out early on in her article, ‘the problems of authorship and textual unity in the Romaunt have deflected attention from the poem itself; most critical investigations have been related to the controversy about attribution’.59 Sanchez-Martí, too, declares himself to be aware of the dominance of this controversy: ‘the principal interest of modern criticism in the Romaunt has consisted in determining the extent of Chaucer’s participation in its production’.60 Both critics declare their departure from this author-centred mindset, and their intentions to view the text in a primarily literary fashion. Yet, curiously, both articles in fact perpetuate the very critical tendency that they deplore, choosing only to consider part A of the Romaunt precisely because of its supposed link to Chaucer.61 Sanchez-Martí’s introductory abstract is especially revelatory in this regard: the interest of modern criticism in the Romaunt has mainly focussed on the issue of authorship, whereas attempts to assess this text as a translation have been limited both in their number and scope. This paper concentrates upon Chaucer’s translation of the Roman de la Rose, and provides an evaluation of Fragment A (my emphasis).62 Sanchez-Martí articulates a critique of the author-centred approach which has been so prevalent in Romaunt-criticism, while in the very next sentence he announces his intention of perpetuating that approach through concentrating solely on ‘Fragment A’, because it is ‘Chaucer’s’. Eckhardt similarly sets her evaluation of ‘the Romaunt as literary text’ (or, to be more accurate, ‘Fragment A’ of the Romaunt), against the backdrop of ‘Chaucer’s general habits as a translator’,63 once more yoking the text to Chaucer, and discarding those parts of it which are not assumed to be his.

58 The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, p. 21 and Schoch, ‘The Differences in the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose’. 59 Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation’, p. 42. 60 Sanchez-Martí, ‘Chaucer’s “makyng”’, p. 218. 61 One recent article at last shows signs of moving away from a Chaucer-centred approach to the Romaunt; Laura J. Campbell notes that discussion of Chaucer’s authorship is not relevant to her application of contemporary translation theory to the text, ‘Reinterpretation and Resignification’, esp. p. 326 n. 1. 62 Sanchez-Martí, ‘Chaucer’s “makyng”’, p. 217. 63 Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation’, pp. 43, 45–46.

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In a more metrical vein, and in the wake of the nineteenth-century work by Skeat and others which aimed to isolate and identify Chaucer-specific metrical patterns, studies have recently been undertaken with the related aim of ‘proving’, once and for all, Chaucer attribution through statistical analysis and comparison of metrical evidence. Li’s recent study, for example, considers all three sections of the Romaunt, and labels A as metrically ‘Chaucerian in style’.64 The overall argument of Li’s article is, however, to ‘rehabilitate’ C, by calling on ‘Chaucerian scholars to re-evaluate [its] authenticity […] and consider revoking the death penalty imposed on it, and accepting it as part of the Chaucer canon’ alongside A.65 Li’s critical vocabulary here is revealing: in what ways is a critical ‘death penalty’ linked to ‘authenticity’ and canonicity? Why should such a penalty be ‘revoked’ simply because Chaucer attribution is suggested? Even more revealing is the way in which Li discusses section B, which, he finds, is ‘evidentially non-Chaucerian […] not by Chaucer’.66 Li’s differentiation of B from A and C is at times discussed in an openly pejorative fashion. B is ‘aberrant’, ‘peculiar’, and, most strikingly, it ‘fails to win a single vote’ in favour of Chaucer authorship, when compared to the (apparently more electorally successful) sections A and C.67 This critical discourse, particularly Li’s extended ballot-box metaphor, works not just to differentiate the presumed Chaucer from the non-Chaucer, but to suggest its consequent inferiority as a piece of writing: once again, ‘fragments’ assumed to be by Chaucer are implicitly presented as critically superior to those which are not.68 Discussions of the Romaunt in fact create conceptual ‘fragments’ of the text, fragments which pit Chaucer versus non-Chaucer material, and which have no basis whatsoever in the codicological presentation of the Romaunt, either in MS G or in Thynne 1532. This point is absolutely crucial to my approach in this chapter: in neither of these witnesses is any interest whatsoever displayed in ‘fragmenting’ the text of the Romaunt visually according to changes in translator, or according to Chaucer attribution. Either the producers of these codices were unaware of the fact that more than one translator was involved in the Romaunt’s production, or they were utterly uninterested in rendering these changes in translator visible. In MS G, the text of the Romaunt is certainly divided, through use of illuminated borders, running headers, and rubrication: this is a feature common to many medieval manuscripts (not least manuscripts of the Rose itself, as we shall see). These divisions do not, however, fragment the text according to changes in translator; rather the reverse. MS G’s recurrent and meticulously planned decorative scheme contributes

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Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’, p. 176. Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’, p. 177. Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’, p. 176. Li, ‘Metrical Evidence’, pp. 171, 176. Li’s terminology here is oddly reminiscent of that of Skeat, in his 1900 assessment of the Romaunt found in Chaucer Canon. Skeat here describes how, when compared to A, now posited by Skeat to be by Chaucer, ‘Fragment B […] fails to satisfy nearly every test that exists […] it breaks down miserably, completely, fatally’ (p. 75); in places ‘the true Chaucerian rime has been destroyed’ (p. 82). This correspondence in tone is a measure of just how little attitudes to the Romaunt have altered in the hundred-odd years since Skeat was writing.

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to the reading experience, sequentially dividing the narrative for ease of navigation. Carefully planned ordinatio such as this can form an integral and valuable part of textual presentation in the Middle Ages, serving to sequence and structure a text visually on the page. MS G’s decorative scheme surely gives a sense of cohesiveness rather than fragmentation to the Romaunt, demarcating and linking sections and subsections of a text through a recognizable and reiterated visual system. Indeed, a coherent and planned series of decorated capitals, borders, or other paratextual features forms a major feature of virtually all surviving Roman de la rose manuscripts. Viewed in this context, the Romaunt’s paratextual presentation in MS G in fact situates it within a much wider bibliographic tradition of transmitting the Rose. Unthinking use of the term ‘fragment’ to divide the Romaunt text found in MS G and Thynne 1532 has become more acutely problematic than ever since 2006, when MS E was discovered. For MS E is, of course, an actual, codicological fragment of the Romaunt: a single, isolated leaf from a now-lost, longer manuscript of the text. The reasons for this manuscript’s fragmentation, and for the survival of this particular fragment of it are — like the Romaunt’s surviving manuscript decorations — apparently practical rather than author- or translator-based. A close look at the leaf shows two parallel fold marks 1.1 cm apart, which run horizontally across the page as it now stands. Roughly 0.4 cm above and below each of these folds, running parallel to them, are two lines of small holes and slits. There are five of these slits in each line and they appear directly above and below each other. This leaf of the Romaunt was very probably used as a cover or binding material for another book: folded to form its covers and spine, with holes pierced by the stitching which held quires and cover together.69 One side of the leaf is now considerably more battered than the other: evidence of the way in which the leaf was folded around the book it housed so that only one side was exposed to wear and tear. This leaf owes its survival — and the fortuitous preservation of the forty-seven lines of text that it contains — to its practical usage as binding, rather than to any interpretative ‘fragmentation’ or deliberate selection of particular sections of the text for preservation. The discovery by Horobin of this ‘new fragment’ of the Romaunt serves as a useful and timely reminder of the limitations of current scholarly approaches to the text. It is surely time to start considering the Romaunt as it is presented to readers in its surviving manuscript format: as a translation of the Roman de la rose, taking into account all three sections together, rather than a fragmented, incomplete, and unsatisfactory Chaucer production. Before doing so, however, I want to reconsider briefly the principal reasons behind the critical obsession with attribution to Chaucer: Eustache Deschamps’s Ballade 285 and The Legend of Good Women, both of which texts feature passages that refer, or appear to refer, to the idea of Chaucer as a Rose-translator.

69 On the ubiquity of reusing manuscript leaves as binding for other books in the Middle Ages, see Pickwoad, ‘The Use of Fragments’ and Sheppard, ‘Medieval Binding Structures’.

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‘Grant translateur’: Chaucer as Rose Translator? Most discussions of the Romaunt mention (however briefly) two pieces of textual evidence upon which, it is traditionally asserted, Chaucer attribution for at least Section A rests. These are the reference made to a translation of the Rose undertaken by the narrator in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women,70 and the reference made by the French poet Eustache Deschamps to Chaucer as ‘grant translateur’ (great translator) of the Rose ‘en bon anglès’ (v. 17; into good English).71 The traditional division of the Romaunt into three sections has, as noted, led to the identification of A as at least not prohibitively unlike Chaucer’s style: it has, therefore, traditionally been argued that the Rose-translation mentioned by Deschamps, the Rose-translation mentioned in the Prologue to the Legend, and Section A of the Romaunt must be one and the same text. This assumption is perhaps based more upon hope than fact, however.72 Chaucer evidently read and thoroughly absorbed the Rose: he makes extensive and varied intertextual use of it, as well as the two explicit references he makes to it by name.73 To have a translation of one of the most popular European vernacular texts of the thirteenth century, made by the so-called ‘father of English poetry’, to have the reference made in the Prologue to the Legend proved biographically true, and to believe Deschamps’s compliments to be true to life and sincerely laudatory have all held an irresistible fascination for most critics: as we have seen, even if arguing about which Romaunt-section to attribute to Chaucer, most have been more or less united in the belief that at least one should be his. The traditional view of Deschamps’s ballade addressed to Chaucer has been that it is a genuine, laudatory ‘eulogy of Chaucer […] ranking [him] with the great Classical writers and ceding him sole possession of the Muses’ pool’.74 Critics proceeded on the basis that Deschamps and Chaucer engaged in a mutual, courteous exchange of work and compliments; the ballade ends with a plea that Chaucer ‘pran[d] en gré les euvres d’escolier’ (v. 29; look kindly upon the school exercises) that Deschamps will send him, and a request for a response to them. More recently, however, critics have begun to investigate the possibility that Deschamps was not being as sincere

70 ‘For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose | Thou hast translated the Romauns of the Rose’, F-Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, ll. 254–55. 71 Œuvres completes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. by Le Queux de Saint Hilaire and Raynaud, ii (1880): Balades de Moralitez, B285, usually dated to the 1380s. See also Wimsatt, Chaucer and his French Contemporaries, pp. 248–49. 72 Horobin’s assertion that the dialectical bases for the division of the Romaunt may be flawed would indicate that the solution to the problem of the Romaunt’s triple authorship cannot adequately be found by simply trying to identify one section as more ‘Chaucerian’ than the others. 73 For exciting recent explorations of the ways in engagement with it shapes his poetic practice, see Kamath, Authorship and Allegory and Knox, ‘Romance of the Rose’. 74 Wimsatt, Chaucer’s French Contemporaries, p. 251. See also Hanly, ‘France’, p. 156, and compare Calin, ‘The Dangers’, p. 76 for a summary of such critical positions.

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or as laudatory as we would perhaps like to think him.75 Calin in particular argues that there is ‘no concrete evidence that any French writer in the Middle Ages was [significantly] shaped by books in the English vernacular’.76 Calin notes that all suggestions that Deschamps resided in England for a while, becoming proficient in the English language and exposed to Chaucer’s writing, are in fact based upon readings of Ballade 258 which privilege or presuppose this scenario, rather than proceeding from substantiated fact; these readings of the ballade often go on to assume genuine admiration for an English translation of the Rose sent by Chaucer to Deschamps.77 Deschamps’s ballade in fact bristles with language that is ambiguous, to say the least. It is full of puns surrounding the authority of a translator, and barbed references to the non-English provenance of much of Chaucer’s (translated) work.78 Chaucer is ‘Ovides grans en ta poeterie’ (v. 3; great Ovid in your poetry), he is building ‘un vergier’ (a garden) made up of the works of ‘ceuls qui font pour eulx auctorisier’ (vv. 18–19; those who write in order to authorize themselves), in the midst of which is the Rose ‘en bon anglès’ (vv. 16–17; in good English).79 Deschamps, on the other hand complains that ‘en Gaule seray paralitique | Jusques a ce que tu m’abuveras’ (vv. 26–27; in France I will be paralysed, until you [Chaucer] quench my thirst) from the well of Helicon. Deschamps builds up a careful pattern of garden and flower imagery, which chimes neatly with the mention of a Rose translation, and which culminates in a plaintive assessment of himself as ‘[une] ortie’ (v. 32; a nettle). One cannot help suspecting Deschamps of tongue-in-cheek humour; his exaggerated self-abasement is equalled only by exaggerated praise for Chaucer, who, according to Deschamps, ‘[s]’auctorise’ in English specifically through translation of other people’s work. The refrain ‘Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier’ (great translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer) runs through ballade at the end of each verse: the emphasis placed by Deschamps on the one hand on Chaucer’s resemblance to such foundational auctors as Ovid, Socrates, and Seneca,80 and on the other his status as ‘Grant translateur’ is striking and suggestive. Alongside this ambivalence, Deschamps piles up repeated (and at times somewhat abstruse) references to the mythical long history of ‘Albie’ (v. 12; Albion) and the

75 See for example Calin, ‘The Dangers’, pp. 77–80; Calin, following Wimsatt, Chaucer’s French Contemporaries, pp. 251–52, here raises the very pertinent point that Deschamps is writing within a pre-existent tradition of ballade exchanges and encomiastic verse. He thus partakes of ‘shared conventions’ and ‘rhetorical commonplaces’ (Calin, p. 77): the ballade cannot possibly tell us what, if anything, he ‘really’ thought of Chaucer. 76 Calin, ‘The Dangers’, p. 80. 77 Calin, ‘The Dangers’, p. 79. For an example of such a reading, see Brown, ‘Poets, Peace, the Passion and the Prince’, pp. 190–92, 196. 78 Butterfield proposes a new reading of the ballade as invective which participates in the socio-political context of the Hundred Years’ War and constitutes ‘a competitive […] aggressive challenge’, part of contemporary cross-Channel invective, rather than straightforward praise and admiration, Familiar Enemy, pp. 143–51, at p. 150. 79 The comparison to Ovid is particularly pointed; Ovid too ‘chose to manipulate and reconstruct stories he […] inherited’, Holton, The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics, p. 68. 80 Compare vv. 1–2: ‘O Socrates plains de philosophie | Seneque en meurs’ (O Socrates, full of philosophy, Seneca in morals).

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etymology of its name — the ‘regne d’Eneas’, ‘L’Isle aux Geans — ceuls de Bruth’, ‘la terre Angélique | Qui, d’Angela saxonne, est puis flourie | Angleterre’ (vv. 6–14; realm of Aeneas, island of giants — those of Brutus, the Angelic/Anglian land [in] which, from Angela the Saxon/Anglo-Saxon, afterwards flowered England). Wimsatt discerns a ‘pedantic’ or digressive shift in tone at these moments in the ballade;81 we might also consider the arresting scholastic or technical register employed by Deschamps (‘rethorique’, ‘theorique’, ‘ethimologique’, for example; vv. 4, 5, 15; rhetoric, theory, etymology). This thread of imagery is perhaps less of a digression than first appears, however. The retrospective construction of an illustrious classical past and the inventive shaping of a linguistic counterpart to that past, in the form of etymological constructions charting the sweep through time from Brutus to the medieval present are suggestively paralleled with the ballade’s figuration of the act of literary translation through the key verb ‘flourie’ (v. 14; flowered). Just as Chaucer, the English ‘translateur’, is here conceptualized as building a garden out of others’ flowering plants, so ‘Angleterre’ has flowered progressively through time and space from Brutus’s beginnings, ‘le derrenier en l’ethimologique’ (v. 16; the last in the etymological list). Deschamps here recognizes and asserts the sheer power of translation to appropriate textual traditions; to reshape and redraw literary histories — and with them, narratives of power and identity. When Deschamps labels Chaucer a ‘grant translateur’, then, the assessment perhaps does not necessarily connote grovelling admiration or unqualified homage.82 Nor can it be taken at absolute or literal face value as a reference to an accomplished English translation of the Roman de la rose by Chaucer which Deschamps thought particularly inspired or successful. The second major reference to a Rose-translation by Chaucer is found in one of his own literary works. Within the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, one of Chaucer’s characters explicitly refers to the narrator ‘translating’ the Rose, a reference which is usually read literally as straightforwardly biographical and factually correct.83 The God of Love lambasts the Prologue’s narrator for some of his literary productions, including, apparently, a translation of the Rose:84

81 Wimsatt, Chaucer’s French Contemporaries, pp. 250–51. 82 Strakhov in a very recent article reads the classical intertexts of the ballade as constructing a complex ‘poetics of exile’ shared between Chaucer and Deschamps who are ‘mutual recipients of a shared classical cultural legacy’, in the context of the Hundred Years’ War. She persuasively suggests that the ballade is ‘about far more than the question of Chaucer’s fame outside England’ — and, I would add, the question of whether Deschamps was ‘actually’ referring to the Romaunt of the Rose: ‘Tending to One’s Garden’, pp. 249, 248, and 237. 83 For example, Benson, Riverside, p. 686: ‘He [Chaucer] thought well enough of it [the Rose] to undertake the translation that earned him the God of Love’s displeasure’, or Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, p. xxxiv: ‘we know that Geoffrey Chaucer did translate the Roman de la Rose for he tells us so himself in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women’. 84 It is perhaps worth reiterating the important, if obvious, caveats expressed by George Kane here: Chaucer’s fictional characters, including his narrators, ‘may be self-dramatizations, they were not […] designed as autobiography’, ‘The Autobiographical Fallacy’, p. 4. Kane draws attention to the particular complexity involved in dream visions and their narration (esp. pp. 8–14), concluding that ‘we have no entitlement to take the words […] of the narrators at their face value’ (p. 14).

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For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose, Thou hast translated the Romaunce of the Rose, That is an heresye ayeins my lawe, And maketh wise folk fro me withdrawe. (F-Prologue, 328–31) The English verb ‘translaten’ carries multiple meanings. The pun made here at l. 255 highlights the way in which a linguistically translated text is a changed text, and also potentially, the way in which a text, or parts of it, can be ‘translated’ in the sense of ‘borrowed’ or ‘moved’ from one work to another. Such a reading of the past participle ‘translated’ is peculiarly appropriate to this particular couplet, because l. 254, ‘in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose’ is, in fact, a very close paraphrase of a single line lifted (or, indeed, ‘translated’) from the Rose. In her now-famous discussion with the dreamer concerning words and objects, Jean de Meun’s Raison states that N’encor ne faz je pas pechié Se je nomme les nobles choses Par plain texte sanz mettre gloses. (vv. 6952–54, my emphasis) (Nor do I commit a sin if I name noble things in plain text, without putting in a gloss.) The God of Love accuses the narrator of translating the Rose: altering its meaning and/ or shifting it into his own work, appropriating it for his own ends. Ironically, at the very same moment, he also, apparently unwittingly, does so himself. His accusation that the Prologue’s narrator has ‘translated’ the Rose is framed in terms which he, himself ‘translates’ into the Prologue from the mouth of Lady Reason. Indeed, the God of Love’s very presence in the Prologue might be considered a form of Rose-translation: a tyrannical and forceful Cupid who overwhelms and subdues a dreaming love-struck narrator within a garden setting is, of course, one of the major features of the Rose’s opening scenes. Kamath comments on the way in which Chaucer here ‘follows the Rose poets […] in the narrator-protagonist’s encounters with personifications, crafting a picture of literary legacy through envisioning earlier poets, or the characters of their poetry, as his predecessors in such meetings’.85 Chaucer’s Cupid reprises Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s: he seems to hold a similar position within the Prologue to the one he occupies within the Rose, certainly in terms of his assumption of absolute authority over the dreamer-narrator, but also in terms of his strange, simultaneously diegetic and extra-diegetic position. As we saw in Chapter 2, it is Cupid who stands simultaneously ‘within’ and ‘outside’ the Rose’s narrative, both a character within the text, but also able to narrate that text, to retrospectively alert us to Guillaume’s death and to predict and influence the continuation of Jean de Meun even as he must form part of that continuation. Chaucer’s Cupid, in citing Reason’s words, is situated in 85 Kamath, Allegory and Authorship, p. 85.

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a similar position in relation to the Rose: he is both a character within it but also, apparently, able to ‘read’ the text from the outside, able to select and translate words uttered by other characters within the work. That the words uttered by Reason which are selected by Cupid for ‘translation’ themselves encode one of, if not the, most fundamental interpretative cruces in relation to translation as an activity adds a further level of complexity to this moment. The words ‘pleyn texte’ and ‘glose’, as Barr has pointed out, encode two opposing senses of what a ‘translation’ does to its source text: exact replication versus interpretative remaking, glossing, alteration.86 A translation ‘in pleyn text’ implies a sense of equivalence or ‘same-ness’, especially when read alongside an absent or un-needed interpretative ‘glose’. Yet the term ‘pleyn’ (from OF plain), whilst connoting ‘plain’ or ‘unadorned’ with a gloss, is equally suggestive of its homonym ‘plein’, from OF plein and Latin plenus, meaning ‘full’ or ‘complete’.87 In this reading, the ‘pleyn text’ of the translation is ‘full’ rather than ‘unadorned’: the gloss is no longer needed because it is contained within the translated text, rather than appended to it as an external feature. Interpretative comments added within a translation can no longer adequately be differentiated from the ‘text’ itself, a reading which has knock-on implications for the use of the term ‘glose’. While its primary meaning is a gloss or interpretative comment, ‘glose’ is also used to mean linguistic cover-up and deceit. The ‘glose’ in the original sense of interpretative comment and added material can be so embedded in the translated ‘pleyn text’ that it becomes a deceit as well in the sense that it cannot be reliably recognized or distinguished. As Chaucer’s ‘rose/glose’ rhyme here suggests, the ‘glose’ effectively becomes the ‘Rose’.88 That Chaucer’s Cupid specifically labels the act of translation as akin to ‘heresye’ is also significant in probing this dynamic between text, gloss, and translation. Barr has explored the resonances of this term in the context of Ricardian approaches to image-making, suggesting that Cupid’s use of this very loaded term denotes a categorical ‘refusal to countenance the differentiality [which is inevitably] produced by translation’:89 the way in which no translation can ever be an exact replica of its source. Barr’s reading of this passage focuses not on the literal implications of whether or not Chaucer actually translated the Rose, but on the way in which the concept of translating the Rose as both a process of replication and interpretative change is employed as a tool to parallel and expose the tightly policed ‘Ricardian insistence on absolute monosemy in the construction of the regal image’.90 ‘Cupid’s hostility to translation is to the process itself because translation represents a challenge to the

86 Barr, Socioliterary Practice, pp. 98–104. 87 See the comments at MED entries for plain(e) and plein(e): ‘It is difficult to distinguish ME plain(e adj. from plein(e adj. to which some of the quots. given here may belong’. 88 Rose/‘glose’ are rhymed twice in Chaucer’s extant verse; once here, and once in the Book of the Duchess: ‘And alle the walles with colours fine | Were peynted, bothe text and glose, | Of al the Romaunce of the Rose’ (ll. 332–34). Once again, Chaucer uses the rhyme to set up an intimate relationship between ‘text’ and ‘gloss’ in the context of the Rose. 89 Barr, Socioliterary Practice, p. 102. 90 Barr, Socioliterary Practice, p. 102.

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construction of the same’ Barr writes, noting that the Rose is actually a peculiarly resonant example to use precisely because of its contested status91 — and, I would add, because of its complex and multiple textual history. The Rose is a text which, even without translation into another vernacular language, very pointedly defies ‘monosemy’ and ‘the construction of the same’: as such, it is an ideal candidate with which to illustrate conceptually Cupid’s attempt to ‘police differential representation’92 through outlawing translation. I have here discussed two explicit references to Chaucer ‘translating’ the Rose in a deliberately, perhaps provocatively non-literal fashion, attempting to tease out some of the more complex suggestions which they may encode. I have not done so in order to suggest that such readings are incontrovertibly right, or that they should necessarily be taken as corrections of a more literal interpretation of these references, but to attempt to open up some alternative understandings of these moments. It may indeed be that, as many have thought, in both cases a translation of the Roman de la rose known to be by Chaucer is also being referred to, and that this translation partially or fully survives as Sections A and/or C of the Romaunt. If this is indeed the case, however, the degree and near-universality of critical dissatisfaction with Section A as a Chaucer production is perhaps surprising. This dissatisfaction is expressed in a variety of ways. Editorially speaking, the text is placed at the very back of the standard Chaucer edition, The Riverside Chaucer, a decision which eloquently dramatizes its marginal position in relation to the contents of the rest of the volume.93 And critical comments on the text almost invariably make reference to its close adherence — formally, syntactically, and semantically — to the Rose. This apparent derivativeness — translation as ‘translating line by line’ as opposed to ‘adapting’ more freely — is very often seen negatively, aligned with dullness and lack of inspiration.94 Kamath, for example, implicitly classes Section A of the Romaunt as a ‘direct translation’, a concept which she explicitly contrasts with Chaucer’s ‘more innovative verse’.95 The relative lack of ‘innovation’ displayed by Section A of the Romaunt has proved problematic for several critics of the text. How do we reconcile the way in which Chaucer elsewhere discusses — indeed, explores — the creative potentialities of translation — the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, for example — with the critical desire to attribute Section A of the Romaunt to him? One popular solution to this problem has been to place the Romaunt at the start of Chaucer’s writing career. By placing it at the very start of the canon, critics can excuse or explain away what they see as its relatively pedestrian or imitative nature: Eckhardt, for example, warns that we should not ‘overestimate the extent to which the

91 Barr, Socioliterary Practice, pp. 98–99. 92 Barr, Socioliterary Practice, p. 102. 93 The text immediately preceding the Romaunt in Riverside is A Treatise on the Astrolabe — another work which has been identified as ‘embarrass[ing]’ to scholars invested in a ‘modern view of Chaucer’s attractions’, Horobin, ‘The Scribe of Bodleian Library MS Bodley 619’, p. 109. 94 Boroff, ‘Chaucer’s English Rhymes’, p. 228. 95 Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, p. 73.

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mature Chaucerian voice is present in […] a rather early literary effort’.96 According to Sanchez-Martí, a young Chaucer, finding himself situated in ‘a mediocre literary tradition, […] engaged in the translation as a […] test run’.97 Similarly, David, in the explanatory notes to the Riverside Chaucer, defines Section A of the Romaunt, ‘a very literal translation’, as ‘apprentice work’, belonging to an ‘early period’,98 while Long suggests that Chaucer translated ‘part of the Roman [de la Rose] […] as an intellectual exercise, a way of knowing the work better’ so that he could then ‘incorporate […] its qualities into his own [subsequent] writing’.99 These assessments clearly subscribe to a model in which Chaucer’s literary skill and the complexity of his poetic productions increase in tandem with his age and experience: because Section A is ‘very literal’ as a translation, it must be the test run of a poet who is, as yet, an apprentice learning his trade. However, a consideration of the Book of the Duchess, also widely thought to be a product of Chaucer’s early years,100 and also an adaptation from vernacular French sources101 reveals that Chaucer, at the start of his career as well as at its close, was both interested in questions of authorship, authority, and the status of translations or adaptations, and capable of reflecting on this in a nuanced and complex fashion within a particular work. As Butterfield demonstrates,102 Chaucer’s exploitation of the French-language literary landscape which he reconfigures in the Duchess shows a heightened awareness of the complexities and potentialities of adaptation and translation: the Duchess is ‘a text which goes far beyond the mere translation of French matter and manners into English’.103 As the Duchess shows, an early date (insofar as that can be securely determined) is not a guarantee of a text’s relative ‘simplicity’ or lack of complex experimentation. To turn this equation around, a largely word-for-word or ‘literal’ translational technique which focuses on replication rather than extensive alteration or adaptation surely cannot, in itself, be a guarantee of immaturity or ‘early’ production, any more than it is possible to conceptualize such a translation as ‘simple’ or ‘the same as’ its source. Making this assumption about Section A of the Romaunt perhaps suggests more about the relative critical value which we accord to different approaches to translation, and the ways in which we privilege what we perceive as the ‘innovative’ or creative adaptation above what we see as overly literal replication, than it does about the text’s putative place within the Chaucer canon.

96 Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation’, pp. 60–61. 97 Sanchez-Martí, ‘Chaucer’s “makyng”’, pp. 118, 222. 98 David, Riverside, pp. 1103–04. 99 Long, ‘Lens of Translation Theory’, p. 69. 100 And probably with more justification than the Romaunt: the Duchess is usually dated quite precisely to shortly post-1368, the date of Blanche of Lancaster’s death. I return to the dating of the Romaunt later in this chapter; Kathryn Lynch discusses the difficulties of dating the Chaucer canon more generally in ‘Dating Chaucer’. 101 See Minnis, Shorter Poems, pp. 100–12. 102 Butterfield, ‘Lyric and Elegy’, p. 60. See also Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 268–91. 103 Minnis, Shorter Poems, p. 111.

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The positioning of Section A as ‘Chaucer’s early work’ may also be fruitfully situated within a more widespread critical tendency to view Chaucer’s poetry as developing from early attempts which are overly reliant on French models through to properly ‘English’ writing that is fully emancipated from influences from French.104 Butterfield has recently articulated a compelling critique of this prevailing view in relation to the Book of the Duchess: the Duchess, she argues, both ‘marks the moment when literary English was born’ and dramatizes its indebtedness to ‘a very French tradition’, a ‘strange, cross-cultural situation’ which has given rise to critical ‘repudiation [of the] presence of French in this primal history of English literature’.105 Many of the remarks Butterfield makes about the ways in which this ‘repudiation’, or assertion of Chaucer’s ‘Englishness’, is undertaken resonate strongly with the reception of Section A of the Romaunt. So, for example, Butterfield discusses a ‘tension between a modern critical desire to promote the Duchess as English and original and yet to see it as French and derivative’:106 promoting the poem as English involves lauding Chaucer’s creativity in making ‘more’ of ‘the materials left by the French poets’.107 Butterfield also discusses an alternative tendency to conceptualize the poem as brilliant in places but often rough and immature, exhibiting in its youthfulness characteristics that Chaucer later improved and refined. Here, even more easily, the French sources are taken to be part of this early phase and by extension an inferior kind of writing from which Chaucer learned to move on.108 This approach to Chaucer’s work naturally invites a placement of the Romaunt at the start of his poetic career, and naturally allies the ‘line for line’109 approach to translation which most critics discern in the Romaunt with an inferior or underdeveloped kind of literary production; in Butterfield’s terms, something, like French, ‘from which Chaucer learned to move on’. We return to the conceptualization of Chaucer as a unique and original genius: critical assessments of Section A of the Romaunt outline a text which simply does not ‘fit’ into the current critically constructed notion of what Chaucer’s poetry — particularly his translated poetry — is. The Romaunt is, therefore, relegated to the back pages of the Chaucer canon and the early years of a developing career. It is unappreciated, yet it is not quite rejected outright, as the critical desire for a Chaucer translation of ‘one of the most widely read and influential […] poems of the age’110 keeps it — however tenuously — in the mix. To quote Dahlberg, ‘clearly […] Chaucer scholars do not

104 Compare Lynch, ‘Dating Chaucer’, p. 13. 105 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 269. 106 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 271. 107 Windeatt, Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, p. 10, cited by Butterfield, Familiar Enemy at p. 271. Windeatt’s metaphor is revealing: the works by Machaut and Froissart drawn on by Chaucer within the Duchess are conceptualized as something ‘left’ or discarded, raw or unfinished ‘materials’ which await Chaucer’s hand to create ‘much more’ from them. 108 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 271. 109 The expression is Boroff ’s: ‘Chaucer’s English Rhymes’, pp. 227–28. 110 Long, ‘Lens of Translation Theory’, p. 69.

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want to lose [The Romaunt]’.111 It is perhaps time, however, to attempt to resituate the Romaunt critically, both in terms of its ‘Chaucerian’ status and vexed relationship with Chaucer, but also in terms of its participation within long-standing traditions of discussing and interpreting the Roman de la rose.

The Romaunt in Manuscript: MS G In the previous part of this chapter, I have suggested ways in which threefold division of the Romaunt has been deeply intertwined with the business of establishing, dating, and critically assessing the Chaucer canon. In this section, I return to MS G of the Romaunt, in order to examine more closely the whole text’s codicological presentation and to explore its relationship — particularly in terms of decoration and mise-en-page — with French traditions of Rose-presentation. My aim in doing so is to suggest some new avenues of critical exploration in relation to the Romaunt: if, as I have suggested, we remove Chaucer from the equation, in what different ways and contexts can the Romaunt be conceptualized? Instead of focusing on the Romaunt as an ‘early’ or substandard Chaucer production situated on the fringes of the Chaucer canon, we can read this translation and its presentation as a creative and interpretative response to the Roman de la rose, an English contribution to a much bigger and more wide-ranging discussion about Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris’s contested text. This reading is made possible primarily by a reconsideration both of the textual composition of the Romaunt and of the decorative detail with which it is presented visually in its surviving manuscript exemplar. Manuscript mise-en-page can form a way to both articulate a particular reading of a text, and, importantly, to engage intertextually with established literary traditions. Aditi Nafde has recently discussed the ways in which Hoccleve, for example, in his autograph manuscripts, ‘demonstrates his Chaucerian lineage’ through frequent textual borrowings and allusions and through his mise-en-page, particularly the ­mise-en-page of his stanzaic form. Hoccleve, she writes, ‘seems to be concerned with engaging with his literary predecessor through his manuscript page’: manuscripts provide evidence of intertextual engagement both in the words they transmit and in the layouts they employ.112 In what follows, I consider the Romaunt in similar terms: as a poem which engages both linguistically (through translation) and codicologically (through MS G) with Le Roman de la rose, and with traditions of debate which surround it. Sylvia Huot’s detailed study of manuscripts of the Rose has most comprehensively demonstrated the extent to which the codicological presentation of the text materially articulates the ways in which it was interpreted by its scribes and readers. This is true in terms of large-scale reworkings, abridgements, and interpolations within the text of the Rose — the means by which many medieval readers, of whom Gui de Mori is perhaps the best known, effectively reshaped the poem in line with their own readings

111 The Romaunt, ed. by Dahlberg, p. 24. 112 Nafde, ‘Hoccleve’s Hands’.

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of it, producing different manuscript recensions of the text.113 It is also true in terms of more local ‘annotations, or of programs of illustration […] [and] rubrication’.114 Attention to the detailed codicological presentation of the Rose in all of these areas across different manuscript witnesses allows Huot to ‘discern the outlines of different medieval readings of the poem’, and to analyse the ways in which readers’ varied responses to it were articulated through the medium of the manuscript page.115 The Romaunt is, I suggest, one such ‘reading of ’, or response to the Rose. Considering its particular manuscript presentation in MS G and its textual features in the context of the broader evidence of manuscripts which transmit different forms of the French text allows it to be situated alongside — or within — complex lines of Rose-interpretation and transmission. Butterfield, investigating the scribal presentation of Troilus and Criseyde in extant manuscripts, has emphasized the importance of ‘setting the Troilus manuscripts within a broad scribal practice’ by ‘situating them within a larger context: the manuscript culture of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century French secular writing’.116 I attempt a similar series of comparisons here, by using a range of extant Rose-manuscripts to contextualize the presentation of the Romaunt.117 My aim is not to reconstruct or identify a particular putative Rose-manuscript source for the Romaunt; rather, it is to give a sense of the wide-ranging ‘larger context’ of Rose-transmission in manuscript form, and of ways in which the Romaunt might be engaging with a series of ‘broad scribal practice[s]’ employed to transmit, structure, and comment on the Rose.118

Translating the Rose’s Textual Traditions Sutherland’s parallel text edition of the Romaunt and the Rose makes significant use of Langlois’s classification of Rose-manuscripts into families119 to reconstruct a parallel French text corresponding to the Romaunt. As Sutherland himself points out, however, the resultant Rose-text exists nowhere other than in his edition: it is, in fact, a conglomerate of readings from several different Rose-manuscript traditions.120 This

113 Compare Butterfield’s comments on Gui de Mori’s reworking of the Rose: ‘Gui’s role moves with astonishing fluidity between those of reader, scribe and author […] Gui positions himself as a third kind of author figure, somewhere between reader and scribe’, ‘Articulating the Author’, pp. 66. 114 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 11. 115 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 18. 116 Butterfield, ‘Mise-en-page’, p. 52. 117 I have made extensive use of the large sample of Rose-manuscripts reproduced within the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, which holds full digital reproductions of more than 130 Rose-manuscripts, as well examining non-digitized manuscripts. See [accessed 1 March 2014]. 118 Compare Butterfield’s comments on ‘the importance of seeking wider cultural perspectives’ rather than focusing on ‘the notion of a source’ or ‘single and definable moments of transference’, ‘Mise-en-page’, p. 50. 119 Langlois, Les Manuscrits. 120 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, p. xiv. Sutherland details a number of textual cruces which occur within the Romaunt, and which suggest a possible blending of Rose textual families at certain points in the translation; see for e.g. p. xx, at which the Romaunt’s description of Franchise’s hair is shown to have mixed antecedents in two separate families of the Rose.

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situation lends further support to the supposition that the Romaunt was translated by more than one individual. Sutherland argues for at least two Rose-manuscript families, H and R, as the core sources of the Romaunt, with an H-manuscript being used as a source for Section A, and an R-manuscript for sections B and C.121 However, this schema does not account for the influence on the Romaunt’s text of interpolations and readings from the G and B recensions of the Rose, a fact which leads Sutherland to suggest that revisions from a G/B-manuscript had taken place, post-translation, to the Romaunt’s text.122 The B-manuscripts of the Rose form a family which preserves a cluster of different versions of a very early reworking of Jean de Meun’s portion of the Rose akin to the remaniement of Gui de Mori, which I discussed in Chapter 2. Huot describes the B Rose as representing ‘a significant alteration of the text’ which ‘sought to remove discrepancies between the two parts of the conjoined Rose’:123 at its most extreme, it abridges Jean’s text to one sixth of its usual length.124 In order to explain the influence of the B-remaniement on the Romaunt, when he had suggested that its main source manuscripts could be identified as coming from different Rose-families, Sutherland posited a further contributor to the Romaunt, whose contribution was independent of (and posterior to) that of the translators: a later reviser. Following Sutherland’s reading, the reviser came upon the parts of the Romaunt, and spliced together the three sections, using a B-manuscript to rework certain sections throughout the now-joined text, and to supply material for interpolations. Alfred David’s 1969 review of Sutherland’s work critiques especially strongly the circumstantial narrative which he here constructs to account for the Romaunt’s production, particularly the implausibilities and inconsistencies of Sutherland’s reviser hypothesis (as well as the tendency of the Romaunt to inspire this and other such ‘imaginary figure[s]’, which David revealingly describes as ‘scholarly inventions occasioned by the necessity of bringing order out of chaos’).125 However unconvincing his hypothetical reviser, though, Sutherland’s findings do suggest that a parallel-Rose-text which responds to or accounts for the particular features and content of the Romaunt as it has survived must be a hybrid or conglomerate one, whose readings draw on more than one version, family, or recension of the poem. The B-recension forms part of this textual landscape: a presence within the Romaunt which merits reconsideration. 121 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, pp. xvi–xxxiv. 122 The B-version of the Rose reworks only Jean de Meun’s part of the poem, therefore the B-interpolations only occur in the Romaunt midway through section B, when Jean de Meun’s continuation begins. Sutherland notes, however, that certain changes and interpolations, often at the level of vocabulary, imagery, and syntax, have also been made in section A of the Romaunt; these interpolations are usually traceable to a G-manuscript. Those manuscripts which transmit the B-text in Jean de Meun’s portion of the Rose often transmit a G-version of Guillaume de Lorris’s text, hence Sutherland’s suggestion that a G/B-manuscript was used by a reviser of the Romaunt; see Romaunt/ Roman, ed. by Sutherland, p. xxviii. 123 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 131. 124 The B-remaniement survives in several different formats. The most heavily revised version to survive is that in MS Bi, BnF, MS fr. 25524, see Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 132, 139. 125 David, Review, p. 699.

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We could, for example, consider the possibility that the integration of the B readings was intentional at the start, and that a process of collation or comparison was undertaken as part of the translation. There is, as far as I am aware, no compelling textual evidence that B-readings were inserted by a later and independent reviser (as Sutherland suggests) and not incorporated at the time of the Romaunt’s production. Indeed, a plausible suggestion to account for the textual particularities of the Romaunt more generally would be that Rose was intentionally divided into three (or more) sections and allotted to different translators to complete simultaneously, perhaps drawing on a process of collection and comparison of different Rose-manuscripts to inform the translational process, rather than a single Rose-copy. Division and simultaneous translation would surely be the most practical way of approaching what is, after all, a very long text, and mirrors the way in which large manuscripts were routinely constructed, with several scribes working simultaneously on consecutive portions under the direction of a lead scribe or commissioner.126 My suggestion here, then, is that we reconsider our conceptualization of the evidence presented by Sutherland. The Romaunt could well be an example, not of incomplete translation or survival of mere ‘remnants’ of text ‘patched together’,127 but of an approach to translating the Rose which attempted to take actively into account its extremely complex textual history, through collation of different manuscript witnesses and incorporation of different readings of particular passages. If there is no clear evidence to categorically support this reading, there is surely no clearer evidence that the converse is true.128 Moreover, there is a precedent for this kind of activity amongst scribes copying the Rose itself and amongst early readers of their manuscripts: as Huot has shown, comparison of exemplars with examples of different manuscript families, with consequent addition or alteration of material, very often formed part of the copying or glossing process.129 This is true not just of the B-remaniement of the Rose but of other versions of the text too. 126 One of the best-known examples of this practice is, of course, the copy of the Confessio Amantis in Trinity Coll., Cambridge, MS R.3.2, upon which five scribes collaborated: see Doyle and Parkes, ‘The Production of Copies of the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis’. Seymour suggests that this method of copying may, indeed, have produced the ancestors of MS G, ‘Chaucer’s Rose’, p. 24. 127 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, p. xxxv. 128 Compare Machan’s discussion of Chaucer’s translational method and the complexity of source study in relation to Boece: ‘though Chaucer referred to his composition as a “translacion of Boece de Consolacione”, his actual method involved much more than what Boethius wrote. In fact Chaucer was translating from what might be called the Consolation tradition. […] Chaucer himself, as he was translating, in effect created his source by selectively combining portions of the tradition’, ‘Editorial Method’, p. 190. 129 Compare Huot’s discussion of BnF, MS fr. 24390, in which one of the glossing hands has annotated the text with additions from Gui de Mori’s Rose-remaniement, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 63–75, pl. 5 and chap. 3, esp. pp. 128–29; or her discussion of Copenhagen, KB, MS GKS 2061 quarto, in which collation has been undertaken with Gui de Mori’s remaniement and the B-remaniement of the Rose to create a composite text which reflects certain features of both, pp. 124–26; or Langlois’s discussion of the augmentation of Chantilly, Mus. Condé, MS 686 with an extra quire to contain additions to Fauls Semblant’s speech found in a different manuscript from its scribe’s exemplar, as well as material which he originally omitted, and later decided to include, Les Manuscrits, pp. 357–58.

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For example, the possible approach to the production of the Romaunt that I have just outlined invites comparison with the text of the Rose found in BnF, MS fr. 1563. In Chapter 2, I discussed this manuscript primarily in relation to its Querelle-documents; however, it also contains a unique, composite version of the Rose, a version created through deliberate collation of different exemplars and insertion of interpolations from a B-manuscript. Huot describes how the scribe made corrections — usually with red ink — so as to insert lines from an exemplar other than the one that he was following. These lines are not written in the margins; they were copied at the same time as the rest of the poem.130 In other words, the scribe appears to have been creating the Rose he copied as he went along, through a process of constant cross-checking between different exemplars. Similar cross-checking against a G/B-manuscript — whether by a reviser at a later date or by a translator — appears to have given rise to the Romaunt, a similarly composite version of the Rose. Both the Romaunt and the Rose of BnF, MS 1563, then, were evidently created by readers, copyists, and designers who were interested in the varying ways in which the Rose had previously been read and interpreted, and wanted to incorporate some of that complex textual tradition into their own versions of the Rose. The manuscript context for the Rose in BnF, MS fr. 1563, privileging a reading of the text in the context of the commentary on it provided by the Querelle, provides a useful analogue for the activities of the Romaunt translators. Like the compiler of BnF, MS 1563, they express an interest in commenting on the Rose, both through collation of different Rose-families, in particular the B-family, and, in places, through interpolation of material into their translation. In this way, the Romaunt can be usefully situated alongside the Querelle, whose authors also seek to elucidate the Rose and explore some of the questions opened up within it, but who also depend upon a precise working knowledge of its text, both for the construction of their own arguments and the comprehension of their opponents’. Christine McWebb has recently argued for a broader conception of the literary and historical background to the Querelle, emphasizing that it was not a solitary event, but took place amongst other reactions and responses to the Rose. She proposes that there was in fact an ‘ongoing and long-lasting pluralistic reaction’ to the Rose, and that ‘the epistolary exchange was but one element […] in a much longer and more wide-ranging polemic’, an ‘ongoing intellectual debate’.131 From the evidence of the Romaunt alone, it can be seen clearly that participation in this debate, comment upon the Rose, was not confined to France; it was also active in England. Insofar as it reproduces, alters, and comments upon the text of the Rose, the Romaunt closely resembles such French texts as the late fifteenth-century Roman de la rose moralisé of Jean Molinet, the 1526 edition of the Rose by Clément Marot, or the earlier remaniements of Gui de Mori and the B-remanieur. The Romaunt thus fits into a wider tradition of Rose debate:

130 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 158–59. 131 Debating the ‘Roman de la Rose’, ed. by McWebb, pp. xiii–xvii.

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commentary and thematic exploration through re-authorship, in this case interlingual translation from French to English.

Translators’ Interpolations in the Romaunt The subject of translation and re-authorship is subtly foregrounded within the Romaunt, both through careful attention to the linguistic differences between French and English, and, most interestingly, through the incorporation of comments by the translators. Sanchez-Martí, Eckhardt, and Kamath have all drawn attention to the ways in which the ‘French-ness’ of the Rose is preserved in the Romaunt, through the frequent and sustained use of cognate words and through the retention of French place names — although, as noted above, these critics confine themselves to considering Section A. Section A is, in Eckhardt’s terms, ‘an English version of a French poem’,132 a rendition of something which is culturally foreign in familiar terms, yet one which still retains and expresses an element of its ‘foreignness’.133 Kamath, too, has foregrounded the A-translator’s careful use of deixis in order to ‘mark subtly the distance of the translator and his readers from the source’s context’ and thus to insist on ‘a new location for the Romaunt’:134 ‘in this contre’, ‘here, in Englisshe’.135 However, by far the most critical attention has been accorded to a short interpolation into Section A in which the translator appears to address this issue head on; speaking of the birdsong in the garden of Déduit, which Guillaume de Lorris likens to the ‘chanz des seraines de mer’ (Rose, v. 672; songs of the sirens in the sea), the translator inserts a claim that different names are given to mermaids in English and French: […] for her syngyng is so clere, Though we mermaydens clepe hem here In Englisshe, as in our usaunce, Men clepe hem sereyns in Fraunce.

681 682 683 684(Romaunt, ed. by Sutherland)

132 Eckhardt, ‘Art of Translation’, p. 50. For examples of the retention of French place names, see e.g. Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, ll. 766–68: the songs ‘of Loreyne’ are differentiated to those of ‘this countre’. 133 A comparison might be drawn here with Paris, BnF, MS ang. 39, Jean of Angoulême’s personalized copy of the Canterbury Tales, commissioned whilst he was imprisoned in England. The text of this manuscript shows fascinating signs of linguistic and phonetic adaptation of the Tales for a French native speaker. See Crow, ‘Corrections in the Paris Manuscript’ and ‘Unique Variants in the Paris Manuscript’. 134 Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, pp. 74–75. 135 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, ll. 767, 682–83. An intriguing point of comparison might be the moments of French speech in the Middle English translation of the French romance King Alisaundre found in the Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, Nat. Lib. of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1), highlighted by Christopher Baswell (‘Multilingualism on the Page’). Baswell comments that, through these moments of conspicuous ‘French-ness’, a reader may experience the poem ‘as fundamentally French but largely coded’ in English, a coding which ‘is nonetheless easily penetrated, at intense moments, by its genuine voice’, pp. 43–44.

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These four lines render two corresponding lines of French in which the meaning and etymology behind the French word ‘sirene’ is briefly explored: […] pour leur uoiz qu’eles ont saines E series, ont non seraines. (Rose, ed. by Sutherland, vv. 673–74) (by their voices, which are clear or by which they have nets, and calm, they have the name sirens.) As Sanchez-Martí and Kamath have discussed, the interpolated passage marks out the Romaunt clearly as a translation, and explicitly draws attention to its status as an English rewriting of a French text.136 Kamath, drawing on the work of Cannon, also draws attention to what both see as Chaucer’s unique linguistic inventiveness here. Cannon suggests that Chaucer, the putative translator of these lines, is being ‘subtly disingenuous when he says that the compound he wants to substitute for [“sereine”] is “in English […] our usaunce”’.137 The noun ‘siren’ was in fact a French-derived word already in use in English, while ‘mermaid’ is in Cannon’s terms an English compound invented by Chaucer, with its roots in Old English and no etymological influence whatsoever from French.138 ‘Rather than simply borrowing’, then, Chaucer is conceptualized as key innovator of English linguistic usage: he deliberately ‘renders the term […] with an English-rooted invention’, even though he could have retained the noun ‘siren’ and been understood.139 In fact, this reading of the mermaid interpolation — as with so many critical responses to the Romaunt — perhaps has more to do with a desire to focus attention specifically on Chaucer’s linguistic innovation and a perceived push on his part to promote English at the expense of French, than on a close reading of the nuances of this moment. In a recent paper, Knox suggested firstly that the cognate of mermaid, ‘mermyn’, was in fact in use in Anglo-Norman French: a fact which obviously renders far more complex the A-translator’s breezy

136 Sanchez-Martí, ‘Chaucer’s “makyng”’, p. 233, Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, p. 75. 137 Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English, p. 82. 138 Cf. OED: ‘mermaid, n.: Old English merew f water-witch’ and OED mermin, n., which entry lists three Old English glosses using ‘meremenin’, ‘mermen’, and ‘meremennena’ to gloss Latin ‘sirina’, ‘serina’, and ‘sirenarum’; cf. also MED mer(e-min, which dates Middle English usage of the term as early as Layamon’s Brut: presumably, when Cannon claims that Chaucer invents the compound noun, he refers specifically to the use of ‘-mayde’ rather than ‘-min’ as the second half of the compound. However, it seems clear from the glosses cited by OED that ‘mermin’ and related forms do in fact refer to ‘mermaids’ or ‘sirens’, rather than something different. There may also be conscious play upon the similarity in sound and spelling between English ‘mere’ (‘sea’ or ‘pool’) and French ‘mer’ (‘sea’). Despite such similarity, the terms in fact have different etymological origins: the English term ‘mere’ stems from a Germanic root, whereas Middle French ‘mer’ is etymologically derived from classical Latin ‘mare’; cf. OED. mere, n. 139 Kamath, Authorship and Allegory, p. 75.

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assertion that ‘mermayd’ is an ‘Englisshe’ word.140 Just what is meant by ‘Englisshe’ here? Knox suggested persuasively that the deictic focus laid on ‘here | In Englisshe’, rather than stressing a differentiation between ‘here’, England and English, and ‘there’, France and French, could instead be read as an acknowledgement of the concomitant presence of French ‘here’ in the same geographical space. In this way, the translator draws attention to the particular and local complexities inherent in translating between two languages which in fact co-exist ‘here’. The A-translator’s mermaid interpolation, furthermore, has been prompted by Guillaume de Lorris’s implicit engagement with the process of naming and the concept of a name holding (or not) a direct linguistic relationship to its bearer. In responding to this moment by amplifying it, and stressing the complexity of what appears to be a simple exposition of etymology, the translator highlights the role of the ‘we’ who ‘clepe’ or ‘call’ a thing by its name in determining that name. This engages implicitly with a debate concerning language and meaning which is foregrounded within the Rose, particularly through Jean de Meun’s Raison. One of the best-known and most notorious sections of the Rose is the ‘coilles’/‘reliques’ debate voiced by Raison, in which she contends that the intrinsic essence of a thing is in no way inherent within the word used to designate it, and argues for a separation of signifier and signified.141 This debate is brought to mind by the emphasis placed by the A-translator on the fact that a single thing — a mermaid — can be called different names in different languages — languages, such as ‘Englisshe’ and Anglo-French, which are at times spoken by the same people — and yet still retain the same ‘essence’ and attributes. In this way, the A-translator’s interpolation pre-emptively echoes Raison’s extended discussion of ‘balls’ and ‘relics’: a particularly hotly contested section of the Rose which, as Huot has shown, was apparently both supremely fascinating and also supremely disquieting for many of its medieval readers, and which prompted a large amount of intervention in the form of glosses, excisions, additions, and rewriting.142 A second section of the Rose’s narrative which apparently prompted close consideration and engagement on the part of scribes and readers is also expanded in the corresponding lines of the Romaunt, this time by the B-translator. Just after the Lover has paid formal homage to Amours, and become ‘ses hom’ (v. 1952; his man), he asks Amours to spell out his commandments, so that he may do his best to follow them. There follows a brief interjection to the reader from Guillaume-as-narrator, who

140 See AND mermen, mermyn, merminne, n. This entry lists three uses, two of which gloss Latin ‘syren’, ‘monstrum maris’ and one of which refers to a bequest of an item ‘embroudez avec mermyns de mier’. Knox’s paper, ‘The Circulation and Reception of the Roman de la Rose in FourteenthCentury England: The Problem of “Frenchness”’ was delivered at the Medieval Francophone Literary Culture outside France conference, University College London, June 2013. 141 ‘Et quant tu d’autre part obices | Que lait et villain sont li mot | Je te di […] | Que je quant mis les nons as choses | […] coilles reliques apelasse | Et reliques coilles nommasse | Tu […] me redeisses de reliques | Que ce fust laiz moz et villains’, Rose, ll. 7102–11 (And when, on the other hand, you object that the words are ugly and unseemly, I say to you that, when I gave the things their names, if I had named ‘balls’ ‘relics’, and ‘relics’ ‘balls’, you would be telling me that ‘relics’ is a dirty word). 142 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 145–57, also pp. 106–09 and 183.

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positions himself outside his own narrative in order to comment extra-diegetically on its progression: Li dieu d’Amours lors m’en charga, Tout ansi comme vos orrez ia, Mot a mot ces comandemenz: Bien les deuise le romanz […] Qui amer veult or entende, Quar li romanz de or amande; Or le fet il bon escouter, S’il est qui le sache conter. Quar la fin du liure est mout bele E la matiere en est nouele; Qui du songe la fin orra, Ie vos di bien que il porra Des ieus d’Amours assez apprendre, Pour qu’il i vuelle tant atendre Que i’espoigne et que ie commence Du songe la senefiance: La verité, qui est couuerte, Vous sera lores toute aperte Quant espondre m’ores le songe Ou il n’i a mot de mençonge.

2057 2060

2065

2070

2075

(The God of Love then charged me exactly as you will hear now, word for word, his commandments; the romanz tells them well […] Whoever wants to love, now listen for the romanz gets better from here on: now it’s good to listen to, if there is someone who knows how to recite it. For the end of the book is very beautiful and the subject matter of it is new. Whoever hears the end of the dream, I tell you that he will be able to learn enough of the games of Love: he will want to wait so long for me to expound and start [to tell] the signification of the dream. The truth, which is covered, will then be all opened for you, when you will hear me expound the dream in which there is not a word of lying, ed. by Sutherland.) Here, Guillaume reprises his introductory comments about the Rose at the start of the poem, underlining its status as a ‘couuerte’ (covered) text, whose hidden truths will in time be made fully ‘aperte’ (open) for a reader.143 In fact, much of the language he uses is quite strikingly similar to that of the poem’s opening lines: the rhyme of ‘songe’ and ‘mençonge’ (dream and lie)144 setting up the tension between dream 143 Cf. Rose, vv. 18–20, ‘Li plusor songent de nuiz | Maintes choses covertement | Que l’en voit puis apertement’ (Many dream at night of lots of things ‘covered-ly’ which we later see openly). 144 Cf. Rose, vv. 1–2, ‘Maintes gens cuident qu’en songe | N’a se fables non et mençonge’ (Many people say that in dreams there are only fables and lies).

Translat i ng t he Rose

and lie, the linking of the ‘songe’ (dream) with its hidden ‘senefiance’ (meaning) which must be uncovered,145 the assertion that the ‘matiere’ (matter) of the book is ‘nouele’ (new),146 and of course the claim that the dream will, when glossed and expounded within the vernacular text, teach all its readers need to know about ‘les ieus d’Amours’ (the games of love).147 Guillaume, then, explicitly redirects his readers’ attention, at this climactic narrative moment, back to the process, foregrounded at the start, of fully comprehending and interpreting the Rose — an authoritative interpretation which is always promised to readers as a moment they must wait for, but which never actually arrives. Indeed, even as the narrating voice promises complete exposition of the dream, if only readers will wait for it, he simultaneously draws attention to the competing role of mediating voices — those who copy, read, or recite the text — in actively determining its ‘senefiance’. ‘Le romanz’ may well ‘bien deuise[r]’ (order or lay out) Amours’s commandments, but ‘Le romanz’ is, of course, itself, subject to further transmission and interpretation in a variety of different media and contexts. As the narrator acknowledges here, the mediators of a text play a vital part in articulating — and thus dictating — its interpretation. ‘Le fet il bon escouter | Si lest qui le sache conter’: the text is only good to hear if read by someone who ‘le sache conter’ (knows how to recount it) in the right way. A tension is thus brought out between the dream-narrative itself, its correct exposition, and its transmission to readers: the way in which processes of transmission have an effect on its form and, therefore, inevitably shape its meaning. This tension between dream, gloss, and transmission is enhanced by a key Rose- manuscript variant at v. 2065, ‘liure’. Found in the K, L, M, and N families of Rose-manuscripts, where other manuscripts usually read ‘songe’, or ‘dream’, it highlights the physical written form of the text as a manuscript book containing ‘senefiance’: ‘a written work, an object of study’.148 This variant was clearly in a manuscript seen by the B-translator, as the Romaunt translates the word unambiguously as ‘boke’ (l. 2163). Not only does the Rose (supposedly) contain a vernacular gloss on the dream, it also becomes an object which can then itself be read, copied, interpreted, reworked, glossed. At least one reader of a Rose-manuscript with this variant thought the moment significant enough to remark on: BnF, MS fr. 24390’s glossator, as Huot describes, adds two glosses to this section of the text: ‘Roman vocatur’ (it is termed a romance) and ‘liber vocatur’ (it is termed a book). These are added in the top left-hand corner of fol. 16v, and are keyed to v. 2057 (‘bien les deuise le romanz’; the romance lays them out well) and v. 2065 (‘la fin du liure est mout bele’; the end of

145 Cf. Rose, v. 16, ‘Songes sont senefiance’ (A dream is wisdom, it signifies something). 146 Cf. Rose, v. 39, ‘La matire est bone e nueve’ (The subject matter is both good and new). 147 Cf. Rose, vv. 37–38, the famous assertion that ‘Ce est li Romanz de la Rose | Ou l’art d’Amors est toute enclose’ (It is the Romance of the Rose, in which the art of love is all enclosed). 148 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 179. The KMN manuscripts preserve another reworking of the Rose, of which Huot comments that it ‘shows an educated readership, […] one that calls for a close reading of the Rose in the context of Latin poetic and philosophical texts. […] It is not surprising that this version of the poem […] should explicitly identify the poem as a book’, pp. 178–79.

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the book is very beautiful) respectively, using diacritical signs.149 These somewhat cryptic comments highlight several things — the range of media in which the Rose could be transmitted, for example, if ‘roman’ is read (in line with the references to hearing the text) as spoken language, text read aloud, versus the written text of a book. Perhaps more interestingly still, as Huot highlights, calling the Rose a ‘liure’ and opposing it to ‘romanz’ also expresses a sense of the way in which the poem combines philosophical, learned material and authorities such as belong in a ‘liber’ with transmission in the vernacular or ‘roman’ language, as part of a narrative about love and erotic desire: to call the poem a book was to stress its learned qualities, its ties with the Latin tradition […] sensitive to the complexities of the Rose, our glossator noticed this statement of the poem’s dual nature, at once ‘roman’ and ‘livre’.150 How did the B-translator respond to this section of the Rose? It clearly stimulated him to think further about processes of textual transmission and interpretation, for he added a six-line interpolation between his translation of vv. 2064–65 of the French text, reflecting on the ways in which the interpretative frameworks through which the Romaunt can be understood are bound up with physical aspects of its performance, or its articulation in other forms: If any be that canne it saye, And poynt it as the reason is Sette; for other-gate, ywis, It shal nat wel in al thyng Be brought to good vnderstondyng: For a reder that poynteth yl A good sentence maye ofte spyl. The boke is good at the ending...

translating v. 2064 of the Rose Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx translating v. 2065 of the Rose

(Romaunt and Rose, ed. by Sutherland, ll. 2156–63) Taking his cue from Guillaume’s comment that ‘le fet il bon escouter | S’il est qui le sache conter’ (vv. 2063–64; it is good to hear if there is someone who knows how to recount it), the B-translator begins by imagining an oral transmission of the text: that it will reach its audience by being read aloud. The primary meaning of the verb ‘pointen’, repeated twice in the interpolation, is ‘to make pauses in a reading text, to read with pauses’.151 This idea is continued by the use of the verbs ‘sayen’, and also ‘spillen’, which is defined by MED as having, among others, a specific meaning in the

149 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 69. 150 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 69. 151 See MED pointen, v. Example citations include The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. by Blunt p. 67: ‘They also that rede in the Couente ought so bysely to ouerse theyr lesson before, & to vnderstonde yt, that they may poynte yt as it oughte to be poynted’; Promptorium parvulorum, ed. by Way, p. 407: ‘Poynton, or pawson, yn redynge: Pauso’.

Translat i ng t he Rose

context of reading aloud: ‘to distort a speech sound’.152 So, on one level, a ‘reder’ reading aloud can make the text sound odd by not pausing in the right places.153 However, there is simultaneously a danger of more serious semantic distortion, made evident by the B-translator’s pun on the word ‘sentence’. ‘Sentence’ can mean both roughly the same as our modern word ‘sentence’ — i.e. that which is now contained between a capital letter and a full stop — and the broader ‘significance’ or ‘vnderstondyng’ of that grammatical sentence.154 The ‘reder’ who ‘poynteth yl’ can distort the oral form, structure, and sound of a text, and, in so doing, can determine its meaning as well, a key potential pitfall which was recognized and discussed throughout the early development of biblical exegetical techniques.155 Furthermore, this ‘reder’ does not, necessarily, have to be reading aloud. Parkes outlines the way in which written punctuation can serve to convey a particular ‘vnderstondyng’ or ‘sentence’: just as pauses had indicated phrasing in oral delivery, which would bring out the meaning of a text, so in manuscripts from the end of the seventh century onwards, punctuation came to be used as a signal to the eye of the silent reader.156 A ‘poynt’, then, is as much a codicological interpretative feature as it is an oral one. In addition to pausing in a reading text, the verb ‘pointen’ can also carry a range of codicological meanings, relating specifically to ordering written text. These range from references to the use of dot or punctus as a punctuation mark or other written sign, to something along the lines of ‘to make a note of ’, ‘to tabulate’, or ‘to list in writing’.157 A scribe and/or manuscript decorator’s physical presentation of the text

152 See MED spillen, v. The example citation from John Trevisa, translation of Bartholomaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum, taken from the version found in London, British Library MS Add. 27944, fol. 47 is illustrative: ‘somtyme he souneþ […] c for t, as it fareþ in children þat spilliþ & schendeþ many lettres and mowe not haue soun’. 153 Perhaps humorously, at the very moment at which the translator imagines a reader who must be able to ‘poynt’ a text properly for his/her audience, s/he makes use of a rather unexpected enjambement, ‘And poynt it as the reason is | Sette’: precisely the kind of structure which, in fact, trips up an unwary reader and causes them to pause in the wrong place in the sentence. 154 See MED sentence, n., senses 5(f) and 5(h). 155 See Parkes, Pause and Effect, esp. pp. 65–87, ‘Influences on the Application of Punctuation’: ‘It was recognised [as biblical exegesis developed…] that pauses can either bring out or distort the emphases embodied in a text, and that appropriate uses of pauses was necessary not only to bring out the meaning but also the orthodoxy of the interpretation’ (p. 67). 156 Parkes, Pause and Effect, p. 69. See also the discussion of Jerome and Augustine’s use of written punctuation to ‘direct the response of the reader’ to a biblical text, at pp. 15–17 and 67, and the comparison of two differently punctuated copies of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica at p. 69. 157 See MED pointen, v. The most useful citations for ‘to tabulate’ are those from Reginald Pecock’s Donet, ed. by Hitchcock, p. 207 ‘þe treuþis […] ben pointed in þe first party of þis present book’ and esp. p. 212 ‘poynt hem in a papir and þo same reherce’. See also the citation from The Manner and Meed of the Mass in The Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, part 2, ed. by Furnivall, p. 101: ‘Eueri fote þat þou gas, þyn Angel poynteþ hit’. OED point, n. 1, sense 16a gives further useful citations which use ‘poynt’ in the context of writing: Promptorium parvulorum, p. 479: ‘strek, or poynt be-twyx ij clausys in a boke: Liminiscus’ and a collection of recipes in BL, MS Add. 33996, Ein mittelenglisches Medizinbuch, ed. by Heinrich, p. 86: ‘wryte on þat on: “pater alpha” […] and make apoynt […] on þat oþer’.

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in written form — the ‘boke’ and its transmission — is a form of ‘reading’ which also affects its ‘sentence’.158 This is especially important at a moment within the Rose when, as we have seen, it is precisely the promised exposition of the dream’s signification, or ‘sentence’ which is being teasingly predicted. The B-translator translates Guillaume de Lorris’s verb ‘espondre’, meaning ‘to expound’, ‘to interpret’ with the Middle English compounds ‘vnhyden’, to un-hide, and ‘undon’, to vn-do.159 His threefold use of verbs beginning with the prefix ‘un-’ in quick succession underlines a conception of glossing as an activity which ‘brings out’ a ‘true’ meaning already inherent or buried in the text to be glossed. As the B-translator puts it: ‘The sothfastnesse that nowe is hydde, | Without couerture shal be kydde’ (ll. 2171–72). In this paradigm, the glossator’s role is to make apparent something that is already there, although hidden: to take off the ‘couerture’. However, the suggestions made in the translator’s interpolation complicate this rather-too-straightforward image of glossing. Here, the power is in the hands of the reproducer of the text — scribe, reader, reciter, or translator — to shape the ‘vnderstondyng’ of that text through the processes of its reproduction. Given the complex textual history of Guillaume’s Rose — continued by Jean de Meun, copied, glossed, and reworked in a bewildering variety of forms — the B-translator’s added comments, and the decisions he makes about the translation of particular terms reveal a sharp and sophisticated engagement with pre-existent methods of commenting on what Huot has termed ‘the protean Rose’.160 Indeed, the B-translator in particular appears to be peculiarly sensitive to the parallel and complementary roles that readers, scribes, and translators play in re-authoring texts, and to the importance of the Rose itself in conceptualizing and thinking through this activity. Translators’ interpolations into the Romaunt form a way of engaging creatively through translation both with the transmission history of the Rose — as a bi-authored text ripe for further scribal reworking — and with some of its central themes.

‘Gaps’ in the Romaunt and the B-Text of the Rose As Huot notes, the B-remaniement of the Rose differs quite considerably within its own manuscript family, so that no two B-manuscripts are exactly alike in their alterations of the Rose,161 some material having been removed in earlier B-manuscripts, 158 One could also consider here the related use of ‘point’ meaning ‘dot’ or ‘pricked hole’ in relation to the construction of the codex (in particular the preparation of the writing area) rather than the punctuation of the text it contains: see, e.g. AND point, n. 1, sense 6, which gives a citation from c. 1240: ‘pernez parchemyn et enke et jettez 4 ordres des poyntz […] et serrount 16 linez’. 159 Romaunt/Roman, ed. by Sutherland, ll. 2168, 2169, 2173. Especially interesting is the second example, in which the translator speaks of ‘vndo[ing] the signyfiaunce | Of this dreme into Romaunce’, my emphasis. The preposition ‘into’ suggests a movement forward or away, the gloss changing the text, even as the verb ‘to undo’ suggests uncovering or unpicking ‘signfiaunce’ which is already present in the dream. 160 See Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 323. 161 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 131–32. For a complete list of B-manuscripts, see Langlois, Les Manuscrits, pp. 359–405.

Translat i ng t he Rose

then put back in later ones.162 One of the most significant omissions made by the B-remanieur, however, is the wholesale omission of Amours’s discourse about the poem’s two authors which I examine in Chapter 2. This omission is only extant in early B-manuscripts, being reinstated in later recensions of the B-text, a fact which Huot attributes to ‘the admiration for Jean de Meun that quickly developed in the fourteenth century’.163 This same portion of the Rose is, of course, also missing from the Romaunt: it is possible that this omission could be in part a reflection of the influence of an early B-manuscript, rather than unequivocal evidence of the ‘fragmented’ or ‘damaged’ status of the Romaunt’s text. Amours’s reference to Guillaume and Jean, and his retrospective identification of the line at which Jean’s continuation began, would come in the Romaunt’s large gap between Sections B and C.164 This gap begins in the middle of Raison’s second conversation with the Lover and covers many of her comments on the fickleness of Fortune, on love and justice, and her problematic discussion of plain speaking and euphemism, which features the ‘coilles/reliques’ passage. The gap also includes the entirety of Ami’s second appearance in the poem — his extensive catalogue of anti-feminist advice to the Lover, his particularly offensive ventriloquism of the speech of ‘un jaloux’.165 Huot, meanwhile, notes the persistent interest within the B-remaniement, visible to different degrees in different manuscripts, in abridging, excising, or reworking precisely these passages, particularly the second part of the discourse of Reason, including the problematic discussion of ‘coilles’ and ‘reliques’, which underwent particularly complex reworking in the B-tradition. Indeed, the Rose-text which the Romaunt most resembles in terms of its major abridgements would appear to be that of MS Bi, BnF, MS fr. 25524.166 Fr. 25524 also significantly pares down the close of the text, removing La Vieille, Nature, and Genius entirely, while retaining the discourse of Fauls Semblant in a slightly revised format, and also shortening the conclusion of the poem considerably. This feature is similarly

162 Huot, following Langlois, speculates that the corrections and excisions made by the B-remanieur were originally marked onto the manuscript so that a copyist could decide what to take and what to leave, following a similar presentation strategy to that of Gui de Mori; Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 132 n. 5. 163 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 133 and n. 6. 164 Section C begins at Rose, l. 10,683, just after Amours’s final references to Guillaume and Jean (Rose, ll. 10,662 and 10,667). While MS G does not preserve Amours’s identification of the line at which the poem changed authors, it does preserve the moment itself, Romaunt, ed. by Sutherland, l. 4331. Unlike many Rose-manuscripts, MS G does not mark this moment in any way: again, this could denote the influence of an early B-manuscript on the Romaunt. 165 This was one of the parts of the Rose which particularly incensed Christine, who clearly had not read a B-remaniement. The example of the B-remaniement serves to highlight the more general, if obvious, point that the Rose which particular readers commissioned, read, or simply came across by chance would have altered quite significantly, depending on the manuscript they happened to be reading. It was apparently interest in precisely such differences which caused many readers to compare different Rose-manuscripts and note missing or altered text. 166 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 139–51 discusses the Bi-text. Appendix B 1 gives this manuscript’s version of Raison’s speech, the most heavily abridged of all the B-manuscripts.

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consistent with the Romaunt, which also retains Fauls Semblant’s speech, and which ends at Rose l. 12,364, just before La Vieille appears. It may be that the gap between Sections B and C of the Romaunt, perhaps even its omission of La Vieille, Nature, Genius, and the conquest of the Rose is in fact wholly or partially deliberate, based on a reading of a B-manuscript similar to fr. 25524.167 Of course, there may also be any number of bibliographical reasons for these gaps (e.g. loss of leaves in an exemplar) which may thus be totally unrelated to the early B-text of the Rose — as I have noted, it seems evident that at least some material has gone missing from the end of the Romaunt as we have it, although it is unclear how much. The evidence of BnF, MS fr. 25524 demonstrates, however, that some B-manuscripts of the Rose in fact moved straight from Fauls Semblant, Abstinence Contrainte, and the murder of Malebouche through the battle for the Castle of Jealousy to the climactic plucking of the Rose and the swift close of the text. Effectively, Huot argues, this brings Jean de Meun’s ‘continuation’ into line with Guillaume de Lorris’s opening narrative, creating a balanced bipartite poem focusing on the Lover’s experiences in winning the Rose.168 Here, La Vieille exists only to facilitate the Lover’s access to the imprisoned Bel Acueil: after she has done this, the narrative shifts directly to the battle for the Castle, the arrival of Venus, and the narrative of Venus and Adonis, and then shifts again to the moment at which Venus and the troops ready themselves for a further attack having heard Genius’s sermon. From here, the narrative proceeds via the Pygmalion story to an abridged version of the conclusion of the poem, in which ‘the sexual act is still expressed in terms of religious worship [but] the many lascivious details of Jean’s account have been omitted’.169 Taken together, this does not comprise an enormous amount of material — the equivalent of the final line of the Romaunt as MS G preserves it occurs on fol. 90v of BnF, MS fr. 25524, and the Rose has been brought to its conclusion a mere eighteen folios later, at fol. 108v. Each side of a folio contains one column of thirty-two lines of text in this manuscript, so that the entire concluding part of the Rose, counting from the end of the material in MS G, is fitted into about 1100 lines of verse. It is certainly possible to conceive of a Romaunt-text which had a similarly highly abridged ending, and which had lost some text at its close. The textual connections established by Sutherland between the Romaunt and the B-remaniement demonstrate conclusively that someone involved at some point in the production of the Romaunt had read the B-text with enough attention to modify textual features and insert interpolations according to it. Perhaps the B-text also exerted an influence on the narrative structure of the Middle English translation.

167 Huot discusses the persuasive evidence that at least one further copy of fr. 25524’s recension of the Rose existed, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 144. All that remains of this second copy is a single bifolium, identified by Langlois in 1910, and designated by him MS Bï, see Les Manuscrits, pp. 166–67, ‘Fragment Suchier’. 168 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 139. 169 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 143; cf. also Brook, ‘The Pruned Rose’. Of the inclusion of the Venus and Adonis and Pygmalion stories, Huot observes that, while they may seem unusually digressive, the use of mythological narratives may have been ‘perceived by the redactor as an important element of the romance’ following Guillaume de Lorris’s use of Narcissus in the first portion of the Rose.

Translat i ng t he Rose

A sustained interest in the different textual versions of the Rose is foregrounded within the Romaunt, then, both through the insertion of passages from different Rose-manuscript traditions, and through original comments and additions from the translators. This technique clearly echoes that of the B-remanieur (and, of course, other remanieurs such as Gui de Mori), whose reproductions of the text of the Rose involve supplementation and alteration in order to produce different versions which comment on, expand, or reduce certain themes that they consider to be either important or inappropriate. The extensive use made of the B-remaniement in the composition of the Romaunt suggests a keen awareness that interpolation, expansion, and excision formed a large and important part of the Rose’s own textual history and transmission. Within its very form, then, the multi-authored Romaunt mirrors and complements that of its source text. As such, the complex textual construction of the Romaunt, taking in several versions of the Rose, may itself be read as an interpretative response to the Rose. The existence and evident popularity of several different French Rose-remaniements such as those of Gui de Mori and the B-remanieur, serve to remind us that very often the Rose itself was transmitted in forms which we would now consider fragmented or inauthentic, and that, far from being unpopular, such a multifaceted approach appears to have been part of the attraction for many of its contemporary readers. We should, I suggest, perhaps approach the Romaunt in a similar way, considering how it might fit into long-standing traditions of Rose-remaniement, rather than focusing on its so-called ‘fragmentation’ as a sign of incompleteness or inferiority. So far, I have concentrated on the textual features of the Romaunt and their relationship to manuscript groups which preserve different interpretative reworkings of the Rose — and I have argued that the Romaunt belongs as much within a complex tradition of Rose-remaniement as it does within the canon of Chaucer’s poetry. Closer consideration of the particular, local decorative features of MS G will allow for more precise comparison with French manuscripts of the Rose. The patterning of these features, as we shall see, comprises a further link between this manuscript and other extant Rose-manuscripts: in its layout and decoration as well as in its text, MS G of the Romaunt responds to wider patterns of Rose-reception and presentation.

The Decorative Features of MS G At the start of this chapter, I noted that MS G boasts a regular system of decoration from beginning to end, featuring a series of matching two-line champ initials, gold on blue, pink and white, with floral sprays which form borders, a system which presents the text as an ordered, organized, and cohesive whole. Its decorated champ initials and borders were carefully executed after the manuscript was copied by an artisan limner: a specialist in this kind of book decoration whose border work has been traced by James-Maddocks in several other high-quality, contemporary manuscripts of English vernacular poetry. At the level of its production, then, MS G can be conceptualized as an important English manuscript, one over which a certain level of professional care was taken by an individual whose professional identity as

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a guild member was bound up in the execution of his work, and one which forms a key piece of evidence for guild activity in English, vernacular book production in the early fifteenth century.170 In addition to their importance as an identifier of the milieu in which the manuscript originated, however, MS G’s borders and initials provide an organized schema through which to read the text: they often mark out narrative shifts, and they render readerly navigation of the text easier. This feature is especially important at a practical level in a text such as the Romaunt, which runs to almost eight thousand lines of verse over 150 manuscript pages. It is also important at a hermeneutic level: passages of particular significance are given greater prominence by a border and decorated initial, changes in speaker and shifts in argument or subject matter are highlighted. The text is shaped on the page by these decisions, and this shaping has a material impact on the way in which it is read. Champ initials and borders interact with other forms of textual organization in MS G: together, the manuscript’s decorative and organizational features combine to articulate a particular interpretation of the text which it contains. There is a further layer of complexity in the case of MS G, however: as these features work at a specific, individual level to shape the Romaunt, they also work at a broader level to tie both manuscript and text into a bigger network of Rose-presentation and response. When leafing through the manuscript, the champ initials and borders are unquestionably its most prominent and consistent organizational feature. They are not, however, the only means by which the text is organized through mise-en-page: MS G also contains a passage which is rubricated, and a passage which is marked out using running headers in the top margin of the page. The rubricated passage comprises fols 90r–102v of the manuscript, which covers Raison’s second discussion with the Lover. The rubrication is mainly used throughout this section of the manuscript to give speaker markers, as ‘Raisoun’ and ‘Lamant’ engage in lengthy, sometimes quick-fire dialogue. Rubrication is also used to introduce this passage of discussion — the rubricated words ‘coment Raisoun vient a lamant’ (how Reason comes to the lover) are given two lines to themselves within the body of the text on fol. 90r — and to highlight Raison’s description of friendship on fol. 102v, where the words ‘comment Raisoun Diffinist amisete’ (how Reason defines friendship) are given in the right-hand margin.171

170 See further James-Maddocks, ‘Collaborative Manuscript Production’. 171 Kaluza suggests the word ‘aunsete’ for ‘amisete’ in this gloss, reading the four minims after the word’s opening letter as ‘u, n’ rather than ‘m, i’, ‘Zur Texterklärung des Romaunt of the Rose’: ‘in der hs. [the reading “aunsete”] steht allerdings, wie ich mich selbst überzeugt habe, ganz deutlich’, p. 529. He therefore contends that the scribe has made a mistake copying the word ‘amisete’: ‘aunsete ist also ein lesefehler des schreibers der Glasgower hs. für “amisete”’, p. 529. Presumably, Kaluza bases this suggestion on the fact that the scribe does not place a hairline stroke above the final minim to mark it as an ‘i’, as he often does elsewhere; however, the scribe’s use of this feature is in fact not completely uniform across the manuscript, so that its absence here does not, to me, necessarily indicate that he did not intend this word to be read ‘amisete’.

Translat i ng t he Rose

The passage which uses a running header comprises fol. 115v to the end of the manuscript, the portion which contains the vast majority of Section C. As noted earlier in this chapter, in this section, the God of Love’s parliament (with the exception of Richesse) agree on the military strategy with which to take the castle of Jealousy. Cupid resolves to call on Venus’s aid, and then formally invites Fauls Semblant into his service before Fauls Semblant and Abstinence Contrainte begin their treacherous assault on Malebouche. All of this passage is marked in MS G with a running header in the middle of the top margin of each folio reading ‘ffalsemblant’ in black ink. Several of these headers are introduced with a gold paraph, and all are underlined in red ink. At first glance, both running headers and rubrication might be read as suggestive evidence of a desire to ‘mark off ’ Sections B and C as different from each other and from Section A: at no other places in MS G are running headers or rubrication used to isolate a central character’s narrative input into the Romaunt. It is possible that the running headers and the rubrication in MS G could bear further witness to Sutherland’s evidence that the Romaunt was not all translated from the same manuscript of the Rose, or by the same translator. The manuscript from which Section A was translated may not have used rubrication or headers; the manuscript(s) from which Sections B and C were translated may have done, and these differences may have left their mark on the mise-en-page of the different translated sections of the Romaunt, to be then copied by scribes of the text. Partridge outlines ‘a history of continuity with variations in the design of fifteenth-century [English] books’: ‘scribes clearly selected from, expanded and modified the page layouts they found in their exemplars’ rather than starting from scratch when copying a text,172 so that design features could be carried over from manuscript to manuscript. Similar features have been discussed in relation to other fifteenth-century English manuscripts; for example, Partridge has outlined the way in which the copy of Troilus and Criseyde in Cambridge, UL, MS Gg.4.27 makes sporadic use of running headers in books iii–v only of the poem, a feature which he suggests ‘bears some relationship to [a] […] shift in textual affiliation’ which takes place in the manuscript’s copy of Troilus between books ii and iii.173 The non-sustained use of running headers and rubrics at particular points in MS G, then, could be explained by the fact that there are apparent shifts in textual affiliation between the Rose-manuscripts from which the Romaunt was translated.174 In the following sections, I examine the ways in which Rose-manuscripts habitually employ these paratextual features, comparing them with the ways in which they function in MS G.

172 Partridge, ‘Designing the Page’, p. 84, and also p. 82: ‘Surveying details of design across the manuscript traditions for several […] major texts strongly suggests that the default procedure was for scribes and other artisans to reproduce their exemplars in details of layout’. 173 Partridge, ‘Designing the Page’, pp. 88–89, see also his comments at p. 82 on affinities between textual groups and particular kinds of mise-en-page in manuscripts of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes and Gower’s Confessio Amantis. On mixed textual affiliations in manuscripts of Troilus see Ralph Hanna III, ‘The Manuscripts and Transmission of Chaucer’s Troilus’. 174 The non-uniformity of these features may, of course, also be down to practical constraints on the scribe: I return to this possibility in more detail later in this chapter.

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Running Headers in MS G

I noted earlier that Skeat had hypothesized that Section C circulated as a stand-alone poem or extract prior to being incorporated into the Romaunt; the running headers might support this interpretation, in that they could have been copied over from an exemplar which contained just this part of the Romaunt, perhaps alongside other texts. The practice of excerpting sections of the Rose in compilation manuscripts was certainly not unknown: Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 845, for example, contains a selection of devotional texts, in full and excerpted, alongside ‘lengthy excerpts from the Rose’.175 Its Rose-extracts, which its scribe describes as ‘capitle’ or ‘chapters’, comprise edited speeches of several key characters removed from the narrative context of the Rose.176 Significantly, these ‘chapters’ include a version of the discourse of Fauls Semblant corresponding roughly to the material which makes up Section C of the Romaunt, minus its B-manuscript interpolations.177 Throughout the section of Arras, Bib. mun., MS 845 which contains the Rose-excerpts, the scribe makes consistent use of running headers in the top margins to identify the different characters speaking, including ‘Faussamblant’ (fol. 259v): this is the only place in the manuscript where he does so. Arras, Bib. mun., MS 845, then, in the layout of its Rose-excerpts and its choice of Fauls Semblant as a character to anthologize, provides a potentially suggestive backdrop to MS G’s presentation of Section C of the Romaunt. There are alternative explanations for MS G’s use of running headers, however; explanations which do not, necessarily, point to an origin for Section C in an anthology manuscript or a stand-alone poem excerpted and translated from the Rose. Both running headers and rubrics are very common features of manuscripts which transmit the Rose (although by no means all feature them; BnF, MS fr. 25524, the B-manuscript I discuss above, does not have a single instance of either). BnF, MS fr. 1574, for example, uses the header ‘faussemblant’ or ‘faussemblant et le dieu damours’ in the top margins of the section which contains the discourse of Fauls Semblant and his interchanges with Cupid corresponding to Romaunt section C.178 This manuscript uses running headers consistently throughout its presentation of the Rose; however, this feature is not always consistently used. For instance, Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Thott 412 folio179 marks part of its corresponding section with the words ‘faulx semblant’, ‘Amours et faulx semblant’, and ‘De faulx semblant’

175 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, p. 231. See also Huot, ‘Medieval Readers of the Roman de la Rose’, p. 414. 176 Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 231–33. The Rose-excerpts are found at fols 251r–274r of the manuscript. 177 See Arras, Bib. mun., MS 845, fols 259r–261v for Fauls Semblant’s excerpt. It begins with the material corresponding to Romaunt, ed. by Sutherland, l. 6069, and runs (with modifications) to the material corresponding to l. 7472. 178 BnF, MS fr. 1574, at fols 83r–89v. 179 A manuscript which is suggested by Brusendorff as a visual analogue for MS G’s use of running headers, Chaucer Tradition, p. 322.

Translat i ng t he Rose

as running headers above appropriate columns of text.180 This manuscript does use running headers elsewhere for particular portions of the text (so, for example, it marks out ‘Raison’ in a header at fol. 28r, to signal the beginning of the character’s long reappearance soon after Jean de Meun’s portion of the Rose starts) — however, it does not use these headers completely consistently, so that they invariably label each and every page or column of the manuscript. Even more sporadic are BnF, MS fr. 1563’s headers: this manuscript makes special use of them in one place only, to highlight part of Ami’s extended impression of the words of ‘Le Jaloux’. The upper margins of fols 60v–61r read ‘Jalousie qui chastie sa feme’ ( Jealousy who punishes his wife) and ‘Le villain parle’ (the churl speaks); that of fol. 61v reads ‘Li jalous qui chastoie sa femme’ (the jealous man who punishes his wife); and that of fol. 62r reads ‘nota pro mulieribus’ (note for women).181 Like MS G, this manuscript uses running headers to mark out a single section of the Rose’s narrative, and nowhere else, demonstrating that running headers need not appear uniformly, even in a manuscript which, unlike Arras, Bibl. mun. MS 845, transmits a ‘full’ text of the Rose rather than carefully selected excerpts. Rubrication in MS G

Vernacular rubrication is an extremely frequent feature of presentation of the Rose: vernacular rubrics are so common in Rose­-manuscripts as to be difficult to categorize or examine adequately within the limited scope of this chapter. As may be imagined, they fulfil an extremely wide variety of functions, to different degrees in different manuscripts, from summarizing narrative action, to introducing new speakers, to ‘captioning’ images. They can take the form of full sentences, such as ‘Cy revint Raison de Rechif alamant Et parolle en ceste maniere’ (here Reason comes back to the lover, and speaks in this way), BnF, MS fr. 19155, fol. 29v, introducing the return of Raison in Jean de Meun’s portion of the Rose, or ‘Comment le ialous enragie bat Sa fame e[t] la mescroit [illegible] sanz reson’ (how the enraged jealous man beats his wife and disbelieves her without reason) captioning an image of Le Jaloux beating his wife in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 57, fol. 30r. They can

180 Copenhagen, KB, MS Thott 412 folio, fols 67v, 68r. I am very grateful to Anders Toftgaard of the Kongelige Bibliothek, Copenhagen for supplying me with some images of this manuscript. 181 The headers mark specifically Le Jaloux’s discussion of the interior ugliness of women, the incompatibility of beauty with chastity in a woman and the innate predisposition of women to cuckold their husbands, see Rose, vv. 8935–9162. Le Jaloux’s famous assertion that ‘Toutes estes, serez ou fustes | De fait ou de voulanté pustes’ (vv. 9159–60; all women are, will be, or were, in their deeds or their desires, whores), which falls into this passage, has also been glossed in the left-hand margin of fr. 1563 with the comment ‘nota dis faus’ (fol. 62r; note: what he says is incorrect). In the light of my comments in Chapter 2 about fr.1563 as a Querelle­-manuscript, the scribe’s unique use of running headers to mark off this particular section of the Rose and his gloss here are interesting: the discourse of Le Jaloux was one of the most hotly contested areas of the text, particularly by Christine and Col. The final header, ‘nota pro mulieribus’ is particularly difficult to interpret: read alongside the scribe’s gloss to vv. 9161–62, is this less of a ‘note to women: watch out, he’s got your number’ and more of a ‘note to women: look how vilely he slanders you’?

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also, however, consist of single words, often used as speaker markers.182 In the vast majority of manuscripts I have seen, rubrication is maintained throughout the text (albeit sometimes to a greater density in some areas than others), so that the decision of the scribe or organizer of MS G only to use it in one twelve-folio section of the manuscript and nowhere else is unusual when set in the broader context of rubricating the Rose. Again, one could argue that this simply correlates with the practices of one particular translator, or the influence of a different manuscript tradition on that translator: the rubrics all occur in Section B of the Romaunt. However, Section B extends quite considerably beyond these twelve folios of text in MS G, and none of the other folios which contain it are rubricated, so that it seems rather unlikely that there is a direct relationship between the text of the Romaunt translated in Section B and the rubrication in MS G. Again, it is profitable to compare the rubrics found in MS G with those found in a variety of Rose-manuscripts. It is an obvious point, but one perhaps worth spelling out, that the full-sentence rubrics in MS G are both French-language, as are those which comprise speaker markers giving characters’ names (e.g. ‘Lamant’). As I note above, in the Rose-manuscripts which I have examined, rubrics are almost universally given in the vernacular — that is to say, in a form of French. This is not, of course, to say that all apparatus used to surround the Rose is necessarily monolingual. The scribe who copied the Rose in Chalon-sur-Saône, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 33, for example, employs a careful and sustained system of vernacular rubrication at regular intervals alongside an equally frequent system of Latin marginal glosses. However, in terms of rubrics, the tendency certainly seems to be to give them in the vernacular. The decision on the part of the scribe of MS G to use French-language rubrics in the Romaunt could, therefore, denote a conscious choice on the part of the scribe to encode or embed linguistically the French-language origins of the translated Romaunt into the paratextual features which surround it in this manuscript. The rubric ‘Raisoun’ in particular bears closer examination here, as it potentially provides evidence that the scribe was attempting to make the difference between the Middle English text of the Romaunt and its French-language rubrics particularly marked or obvious to a reader. The character Raison’s name is consistently spelled ‘Resoun’ by the scribe in the body of the text in MS G,183 while it is just as consistently spelled ‘Raisoun’ in the rubrics. The scribe thus appears deliberately to mark orthographically the difference between the word ‘in English’ in the text and the word ‘in French’ in the rubrics. It is important to clarify here that I am not suggesting that ‘resoun’ is somehow an intrinsically ‘English’ word, while ‘raisoun’ is an intrinsically ‘French’ one: as Butterfield reminds us, we need to think in terms of fluid rather than binary relationships between ‘English’ and ‘French’, which acknowledge the presence of various forms of Anglo-French — often, by the fifteenth century, interacting with

182 On the use of rubrics to mark the transition between Guillaume and Jean’s portions of the Rose and to highlight perceptions of where the Rose features its authors’ voices, rather than their narrators’ or characters’, see further my discussion in Chapter 2 and Huot, ‘Ci parle l’aucteur’. 183 See, e.g. fols 63r, 65r, 65v, 88v, 90r, 91v, 93v.

Translat i ng t he Rose

forms of continental French — as an ‘English’ vernacular language.184 DMF does not give the form ‘resoun’ as one of the possible variant spellings for the noun ‘raison’ in Middle French; however, both forms are given as possible spellings in both Middle English and Anglo-French.185 In other words, while it may be possible to tentatively describe ‘resoun’ as a non-continental spelling, it is certainly not possible to designate either form definitively as a universally accepted ‘Anglo-French’ or ‘English’ word.186 What I want to emphasize is this particular scribe’s apparently consistent use of the two different forms of the word, one for the body of the text and one for the rubric. I have already suggested that the scribe’s decision to write French-language rubrics may have been influenced by an awareness of the widespread use of vernacular rubrics in Roman de la rose manuscripts. In his consistent use of two different forms of the word ‘raison’, are we witnessing a heightened attention to differentiating the language of the translated text from its mise-en-page? If this is the case, does it highlight the participation of the Romaunt in long-standing and widespread traditions of Rose-reception and presentation which are identified with continental models of copying, distributing, and commenting on the text? The rubrication on fols 90r–102v can be categorized as fulfilling two functions: the first and last instances comprise descriptive rubrics, each beginning with the word ‘comment’ and outlining the narrative action immediately following. Each instance in between these two comprises a single-word speaker-marker rubric, either ‘Raisoun’ or ‘Lamant’, which is used to trace the dialogue back and forth between Raison and the Lover. As Butterfield has observed, speaker markers in manuscripts are ‘more than glosses: they are performative signs […] [which] serve as an interpretative framework’, highlighting the way in which ‘the use of multiple personas within a first-person text […] is a means of giving utterance to distinct voices’.187 Particularly interesting are those rubrics at fol. 91r, which contains a section of the text in which the speakers shift to and fro quickly, often in the middle of lines of verse: Knowest hym ought? Yhe dame parde. Nay, nay. Yhis I. Wherof, late se. Of that he saide I shulde be Glad to haue sich lord as he

184 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 11–14. 185 See DMF raison, s.f., attested under spellings raison, raisons, raisoun, raisson, rayson, raysons, reson, and roison. For Middle English, see MED resoun, n. 2, attested under the following spellings: resoun(n) e, reson(e, ressone, resun, resun(n)e, resan, resen, reason(e, reason(e, reisoun(e, raisoun(e, raison, raison(n) e, and (early) reisun, reaisun, and (error) rosoun. For Anglo-French, see AND reisun, n. which gives attested spellings raison, raisoun, raisoune, reason, reason, reson, resone, resun, resoun, resoen, and resont. 186 Compare Butterfield’s comments on the impossibility of considering Anglo-French and English as ‘single languages’, discrete from one another and from other varieties of French or English: ‘languages do not function autonomously in multilingual environments, but rather form a shifting sense of relationships in which meanings are produced through a constant process of contrast, discrimination, overlap and rivalry’, Familiar Enemy, p. 14. See also her discussion of the nuances of Chaucer’s ‘unchanged, yet alienated’ use of ‘forein’ in his Boece, Familiar Enemy, pp. 294–95. 187 Butterfield, ‘French Vernacular Codex’, p. 70.

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And maister of sich seignorie. Knowist hym no more? Nay certes I, Save that he yaf me rewles there And wente his wey I nyste where And I aboode bounde in balaunce. Lo there a noble conisaunce. (Romaunt, ll. 4658–66)188 The scribe of MS G shows a keen awareness of these speaker shifts, and rather than using modern punctuation, as I have done, to clarify them, he inserts speaker marker rubrics to show clearly when each character is speaking, so that several lines of verse contain rubrics within them (see pl. 1). This is especially important for lines 4658–59, in which there are four changes of speaker across the two lines of verse. Bearing in mind Butterfield’s identification of the conceptual, as well as the practical valence of speaker markers, the fact that this moment of quick-fire dialogue is singled out for rubrication also serves to dramatize the tension, highlighted throughout the Rose, between the voices of poet(s), Lover-narrator, and allegorical personae.189 Here, this tension is acute, as the Lover-narrator recounts an apparently spontaneous conversational dialogue between himself and Raison, in which each appears to respond quasi-intuitively and colloquially to the other: ‘— Yhe, dame, parde — nay nay’. This serves to emphasize that a persona such as ‘Raison’ possesses an existence and an autonomy ‘outside’ the narrator’s control and perception, even as we know that both she and ‘Lamant’ are literary fictions created and manipulated by a poet. Rubrication of this particular part of the conversation between Raison and the Lover-narrator in precisely this kind of dramatic way is evident in a number of Rose-manuscripts that I have examined. Indeed, many scribes appear to have had difficulty in coming up with a suitable, clear layout; I here offer a brief survey of some manuscripts which provide useful comparison points for MS G. Several scribes have chosen to use a layout like that of MS G, in which rubrics are placed in the middle, at the beginning, or at the end of lines of text to indicate who is speaking next. One such manuscript is BnF, MS Smith Lesouëf 62, fol. 30r (see pl. 2). Like MS G, this manuscript sacrifices using one line of verse per manuscript line, and thus placing the rhyme words from the rhyming couplets directly above/below one another, in order to create a clearer sense of the progression and escalation of the argument between Raison and the Lover. Another manuscript which takes this tack is Versailles, Bib. mun. MS 153, at fol. 28r. Like MS G, this manuscript sometimes uses rubrics placed at the end of lines to indicate further changes in speaker as the dialogue progresses 188 I have transcribed these lines directly from MS G, fol. 91r, but have added modern punctuation in order to clarify the changes in speaker. 189 Cf. Butterfield’s comments, ‘French Vernacular Codex’, pp. 69–70, on glossed distinctions — in Rosemanuscripts and elsewhere — between ‘the named persona of the poet and the voice of the writer’. Butterfield cites Huot’s statistic that fifty-three out of seventy-two Rose-manuscripts she examined contained rubrication which differentiated the ‘Aucteur’ from the ‘Amant’, p. 70 n. 35 and see Huot, From Song to Book, p. 91 n. 18.

Translat i ng t he Rose

past this quick-fire moment, and comes to take the form of longer speeches by each character, particularly Raison. Finally, Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5014D uses not only rubricated speaker markers within lines but also one-line decorated capitals within lines to mark clearly changes in speaker (see pl. 3, fols 30v, 38v). A different approach, however, is taken by the scribe of Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Selden Supra 57 at fol. 30r: here, the scribe has chosen to use a new line for each individual spoken interjection, and to fill the second half of these short lines of speech with the rubrics ‘ci parle lamant’ or ‘ci parle raison’ to introduce the next spoken interjection (see pl. 4). At the close of the section of dialogue quoted above, the scribe has had to take a single line for each rubric, as the spacing has not allowed him to fit anticipatory rubrics at the end of lines; this is a layout he continues throughout the rest of the conversation between Raison and the Lover. However, this is a manuscript in which particular interest is expressed throughout in speech acts and conversations in the Rose. Single-line rubrics indicating who is speaking to whom (often employing the formula ‘ci parle x’ or ‘x respont’) in fact make a frequent appearance throughout Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Selden Supra 57: on fols 15v–16r, for example, the scribe carefully rubricates the exchange between the Lover and Amours, while at fols 23v–24r contributions from Pitié, Dangier, Franchise, and Bel Acueil are similarly carefully marked, as is Amours’s discussion with Faus Semblaunt at fols 80v–83v.190 BnF, MS Smith Lesouëf 62 also uses speaker marker rubrics consistently throughout the Rose. These, like the rubrics of Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Selden Supra 57, usually take the form of ‘x parole’, given on a single line, to introduce a new speech or speaker. MS G’s use of rubrics in one place only appears odd, in the light of these examples, although the kind of rubrics that it uses find plenty of parallels. I have not encountered a manuscript of the Rose which restricts its use of rubrics entirely to Raison’s second appearance in the text, as MS G does, or, indeed, which restricts its use of rubrics to any one place in the text. However, the closest analogue I have found, Arras, Bibliothèque municipal, MS 897, is, intriguingly enough, also a B-manuscript.191 This manuscript appears unfinished: gaps have been left by the scribe, presumably with the view to adding rubrication; however, none has been undertaken. These gaps for rubrication begin on fol. 24v of the manuscript with precisely the same conversation between Raison and the Lover as is rubricated in MS G: before this point, regular rubrication does not appear to have been envisaged. Some gaps have been left mid-line on fol. 24v, suggesting that the scribe had precise speaker marker rubrics in mind like those found on fol. 91r of MS G. Spaces for rubrication in Arras, Bib. mun., MS 897 continue to be left sporadically after fol. 24v: they are used in the rest of the Lover’s conversation with Raison, again to mark changes in speaker, and they are also used in the Lover’s interchange with Ami after Raison’s departure (neither of these sections of the Rose, of course, appear in the Romaunt). They continue to

190 Selden Supra 57 also consistently uses rubrics to caption its miniatures. 191 Langlois gave it the siglum Bê, see Les Manuscrits, p. 239, and pp. 110–16 for a description of the manuscript.

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be used occasionally throughout the rest of the manuscript. If it does not provide a precise parallel to the situation in MS G, then, Arras, Bib. mun., MS 897 does demonstrate that, in some manuscripts at least, the Lover’s second discussion with Raison was the first narrative episode of the Rose to receive regular rubrication, and that rubrication was not always consistent across all narrative sections of the poem within certain manuscripts of the text.192 Furthermore, if the practice of using rubrics only in one, isolated place is extremely unusual in manuscripts of the Rose, inconsistent or incomplete arrangement of paratextual apparatus, or omissions in finishing across a long manuscript are, of course, not uncommon in medieval codices more generally. We have seen that Arras 897 is unfinished; although spaces were left for mid-line rubrics at certain points in this manuscript, they were never added. At the other end of the scale, Chalon-sur-Saône, Bib. mun., MS 33 boasts an extremely carefully worked out, frequently used, and consistent system of ordinatio which surrounds and shapes its Rose-text. This comprises running headers on each folio, recto and verso, in red ink with blue paraphs and summarizing the content of that folio, regular vernacular rubrication, a hierarchy of flourished initials in blue and red ranging from three lines to seven lines high,193 and regular Latin marginal glosses and notae, written in the same brown ink as the text, but boxed on three sides in red and marked with a red and blue paraph. Even in this manuscript, however, which seems to treat its dense and complex ordinatio as a very important part of presenting and reading the Rose alongside a marginal commentary, the placement of rubrics is not completely consistent; the scribe begins by always leaving space for them within the columns of text, reserving the margins for Latin glosses; but part-way through the manuscript, he begins to add rubrics in the margins as well, so that they are not always found in the same place. No doubt there were practical reasons for both the Arras 897’s and the Châlons-sur-Saône manuscript’s inconsistencies in finishing and layout; MS G’s use of rubrics in one area only may also have a practical explanation to do with timescale, or with arrangements for finishing the book. The rubrication in MS G begins on the first folio of a new quire, and is confined only to this quire and the following one: this might suggest, for example, that the scribe only had these two quires in his possession when he came to do the rubrication, or only had the chance to rubricate these quires. It is true that in all the instances of rubrication on these twelve folios except one, space has been deliberately left for

192 Cf. Partridge’s comments on scribes who ‘began including elements of design partway through’ the copying process, apparently because they ‘became progressively more receptive’ to what was in their exemplars; Partridge cites Cambridge, UL, MS Gg.4.27’s copy of Troilus, which suddenly begins to feature two- or three-line flourished initials in books iv and v only, and BL, MS Harley 7335’s copy of The Canterbury Tales, whose scribe only begins using initials in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, ‘Designing the Page’, pp. 94–95. He also discusses scribes whose interest in including decorative features seems to tail off, p. 95. 193 I use ‘flourished initials’ in the sense outlined by Driver and Orr: ‘flourished initials, non-illuminated penned initials with pen flourishing extending in to the margin’, ‘Decorating and Illustrating the Page’, p. 109.

Translat i ng t he Rose

it to be added within the body of the text,194 and that spaces such as these do not appear to have been left in the rest of the manuscript, a fact which could lend more weight to the conclusion that rubrication was not planned for the rest of the Romaunt. However, given that the scribe does choose to insert one rubric in the margin of the text, at fol. 102r, it is possible that he decided when copying that all further rubrics could be placed here, so that the lack of spaces left for them within the columns of text does not, necessarily, indicate that no more were planned. Partridge, discussing English vernacular book production in the fifteenth century — the period to which MS G belongs — makes the important point that incomplete or inconsistent finishing occurs often enough in Middle English manuscripts to make it clear that scribes and others responsible for finishing a book did not always work in sequence through a given work or through a book’s contents, but instead could finish individual quires or even bifolia in some other order.195 He also notes that, in reproducing features of mise-en-page from exemplars, scribes could have been faced with unreliable or non-sustained access to these exemplars: ‘one can imagine scenarios where an exemplar might be withdrawn after a text was copied but before all elements of page design had been finished’. There is, moreover, a difference between the planning for decorated initials and paraphs and for paratextual material ‘which required more writing’ — such as rubrication or glosses. While guide letters or marks are often inserted by a scribe as he copies to indicate what decoration should be placed where, written material ‘seem[s] less often to have been sketched in as the scribe wrote his text, and would thus have been more vulnerable to omission’ due to the withdrawal of an exemplar before the manuscript was completed.196 Perhaps MS G’s rubrication is simply due to the removal of an exemplar (of the Rose or of the Romaunt) which the scribe was using to supply his rubrics, after he had rubricated two quires, but no more. Initials and Borders

It remains to consider in detail the champ initials and borders with which MS G is decorated throughout. Decorated initials in some format feature in every medieval manuscript of the Rose which I have seen: indeed, it is almost impossible to imagine a text so long being copied entirely without some system which broke it down into more manageable parts. At the most simple decorative level, initials — some probably drawn in by the scribe of the manuscript — take the form of pen and ink capital letters, usually in red and/or blue ink and usually two or three lines high.197 At 194 Fol. 102v, the final rubricated folio, has not had space left for its rubricated comment, which has been placed in the right-hand margin instead. 195 Partridge, ‘Designing the Page’, pp. 87–88. 196 Partridge, ‘Designing the Page’, p. 88. 197 In terms of decoration, fr. 25524 is the simplest manuscript of the Rose that I have seen. It uses red ink initials only, with very little variation in size of initial and no rubrication or illustrations.

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a more ornate decorative level, there can be flourished initials, painted or historiated initials, sometimes with decorated borders. Very often, a hierarchy of differently sized initials is used, with larger letters or borders being employed to mark major narrative divisions, and smaller ones to mark subdivisions. BnF, MS fr. 1573, for example, uses a range of initials from ten lines tall to two lines tall.198 The designer of the Chalon-sur-Saône manuscript, as I outline above, took extreme care over its placement of differently sized flourished initials. Tantalizing evidence remains that MS G also originally may have employed such a hierarchy in its initial and border design. Currently, one border in the manuscript is considerably larger and more sumptuous than any of the others. This border appears on fol. 57v of the manuscript, and it marks the moment at which Amours leaves the Lover, having given him his commandments: ‘The god of loue whanne al the day | Had taught me as ye haue herd say […] | he vanyshide awey all sodeynly’ (MS G, fol. 57v). Usually, in MS G, decorated initials are two lines high; however, the initial ‘T’ from ‘The’ to which this border is attached is four lines high, and instead of being a simple champ initial, it is illuminated, containing images of foliage matching the foliage found in the border. The foliage in the initial has been arranged so that it resembles a face with its tongue sticking out, and the appendage that forms the tongue is also found several times in the border, this time unmistakably as a penis in the guise of the spadix, or stamen, of an aroid or stylized flower.199 The artist has even included an erect and a non-erect version; by accident or by design, the flaccid penis appears in the border directly next to the lines in which the Lover plaintively recapitulates his love-wounds, which nothing but possession of the Rose can now cure. While I would not wish to overstate the significance of this moment, it is worth noting that deliberate, humorous engagement with the content or themes of a text on the part of a border artist it is not entirely unknown. Indeed, instances of it have been discussed specifically in relation to Roman de la rose manuscripts, particularly BnF, MS fr. 25526.200 The border at fol. 57v of MS G certainly points up a moment of narrative transition in the Rose; it marks the departure of Amours and the Lover’s first introduction to Bel Acueil, which will follow in a few lines. However, it is one of many such moments, and it does appear rather odd that it should be given this pre-eminent decorative status in MS G when nowhere else at all in the narrative has been marked in this way.

198 On the opening two folios of this manuscript, for example, the first letter of the text is given a ten-line decorated initial, and subsequent sections of the narrator’s introduction to the dream are given twoline or three-line initials, before the vices on the walls of Déduit’s garden are each introduced with four-line initials. 199 Scott defines the terms ‘spadix’ and ‘aroid’, Dated and Datable English Manuscript Borders, glossary. The flowers drawn have been identified as ‘Lords and Ladies’ or Cuckoo Pint; compare ‘Thorpe’s’ comments on the artist’s ‘exuberant play’ with their ‘suggestive appearance’, The Glory of the Page, p. 89, no. 36. 200 Michael Camille, Image on the Edge discusses deliberately executed ‘visual play’ in marginal decoration (p. 31). Fr. 25526 is discussed by Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 286–322, and Braet, ‘Entre folie et raison’.

Translat i ng t he Rose

In manuscripts of the Rose, the corresponding line to that which is begun with the four-line illuminated capital, ‘Tout maintenant qu’amors m’ot | Son plesir dit’ (Rose, v. 2763; when the God of Love had told me all that it pleased him to) is very often distinguished by decoration.201 However, this decoration is in keeping with a broader hierarchy or system of decorative features used throughout the manuscript: I have never seen a Rose-manuscript which places decoration here that is more extensive than, or otherwise different to, that found at any other point. MS G is, however, missing eleven folios: could some or all of these have had similar lavish decoration to that which now stands out as unusual on fol. 57v?202 The border and illuminated initial would then have been part of a coherent sequence of textual divisions within the Romaunt. One way of investigating this question is to consider patterns of decoration and textual division more broadly across Rose-manuscripts: here, as in other areas, MS G can be conceptualized as participating in known codicological systems of organizing and decorating the text of the Rose. The opening folio of MS G, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, is missing, and the Romaunt may have contained an illumination, or more likely, a particularly elaborate border, at its start, perhaps including a historiated initial. Fol. 1r apparently contained two lines of text fewer than regular folios of MS G: this is not enough space into which to fit an opening miniature (unless it were placed largely in the upper margin of the manuscript, above the writing area). Historiated initials, however, sometimes do extend above the writing area into upper margins; moreover, they often only take up half the writing column, meaning that the other half can still be used to contain text. The opening folio of the Chalon-sur-Saône manuscript, for example, opens with a historiated initial (with an attached border) depicting a dreamer in bed, dreaming of roses, which extends up into the top border of the folio beyond the top of the writing column, and which only removes three full lines of writing space (see pl. 5). Decoration of opening folios on a more lavish scale than the rest of the manuscript, often including opening miniatures or historiated initials and borders, is an extremely frequent feature of French Rose-manuscripts.203 Indeed, of the sixteen Rose-manuscripts containing only one miniature or large historiated initial which have to date been digitized by the Roman de la rose digital library, in twelve cases, the miniature is situated at the opening

201 See e.g. BnF, MS fr. 2195, fol. 18r; BnF, MS fr. 25524, fol. 45v; BnF, MS fr. 24389, fol. 19v; BnF, MS fr. 1571; BnF, MS fr. 380, fol. 19v; Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 2988, fol. 24r, all of which use a decorated capital of some kind or a rubric to highlight the line beginning ‘Tout maintenant’. BnF, fr. 24389 also decorates this moment with a miniature, as do some other manuscripts, including Cologny, Fond. Bodmer, MS Bodmer 79; Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 3338 and the Ferrell Rose. 202 Caie hypothesizes that the missing folios could have contained illuminations [accessed 8 July 2012]; however, apart from (possibly) the opening folio, illuminations are probably unlikely as — going by the text of Thynne 1532 — the number of lines missing from the Romaunt in the case of each missing folio except folio 1 are an exact match. If there had been illuminations, they would have taken up several lines, so that the correspondence between missing folios and number of missing lines would not have been exact. Folio 1 appears to have contained two lines of text less than it should have done, which could be explained by some decoration taking up the space. 203 On opening miniatures, see Kuhn, ‘Die Illustration’ and Braet, ‘Du Portrait de l’Auteur’.

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of the text.204 Of the remaining four listed manuscripts, in each case the opening folio is now missing, rather than undecorated.205 The digitized Rose-manuscripts containing more than one illumination similarly suggest that an opening miniature was an overwhelmingly popular choice; so far I have only found a single manuscript which, while containing illuminations, does not illuminate the opening page of the text.206 Viewed in the context of French manuscript presentation, then, it is possible that MS G may well have possessed a large amount of decoration on its opening folio. In the case of the other missing folios, it is possible to find parallels in other Rosemanuscripts which suggest that they may have formed particularly important points in the text which were singled out for decoration. For example, in the fourth quire of the manuscript, two consecutive folios are missing after what is now fol. 27. These folios would have contained the narrator’s description of the God of Love stalking him through the garden and his climactic arrival beside the fountain of Narcissus, in which he will first glimpse the Rose, along with the beginning of the narrator’s explanation of Narcissus’s story, the first of what Braet terms the ‘récits intérieurs’ which recount classical myths and legends within the Rose (Romaunt, ll. 1361–1482).207 Guilluame de Lorris’s introduction of Narcissus into the narrative was clearly recognized by scribes and illuminators as an extremely significant moment. The line ‘Narcissus fu uns damoisiaus’ (Narcissus was a young man), corresponding to Romaunt l. 1469, ‘Narcissus was a bachelere’, is almost universally marked by an important degree of decoration, the particular features largely depending on the lavishness of the manuscript in question. So, for example, in BnF, MS fr. 24389, this moment is marked with an illumination showing Narcissus looking into the fountain, at fol. 11r. This manuscript only contains twenty-one images across the whole text of the Rose, so that the Narcissus moment is one of relatively few to receive such a high level of decoration.208 In manuscripts without illuminations, too, this moment is regularly perceived as meriting an important degree of decoration. BnF, MS fr. 19154, for example, uses two-line pen-flourished initials throughout in alternating red and blue to form its decorative scheme. Fols 9r–10v of this manuscript contain the material corresponding to the missing two folios of the Romaunt, and several sections of the narrative are marked in this way on these folios — including ‘Narcissus fu.i. damoisiaus’ (fol. 10r). Aberystwyth, National Library

204 These manuscripts are: the Cox Macro Rose; Versailles, Bib. mun., MS 153; Rouen, Bib. mun., MS 1056; BnF, MSS fr. 24391, 22551, 19154, 1572, 804, 803, 800, 797, and MS nouv. acq. fr. 28047. 205 These are BnF, MSS fr. 799 and 3939, and MSS nouv. acq. fr. 5094 and 20001. The latter three manuscripts are in fact formed of small sections of the Rose, individual fragments of otherwise lost manuscripts. BnF, MS fr. 803 has had spaces left for other miniatures which were never filled in. 206 This is Amiens, Bib. mun., MS 437, in which the Rose contains two illuminations, neither of them at the start of the text. The opening letter of the Rose is, however, given as a historiated initial in this manuscript. 207 Braet, ‘Narcisse et Pygmalion’. Sylvia Huot also discusses the significance of the Narcissus episode, Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets, pp. 16–20. 208 A search of the Roman de la rose Digital Library’s collection returns twenty-four manuscripts which contain an illumination of Narcissus at the fountain. Most place it at this point in the text. On iconographic traditions of Narcissus-illumination within the Rose see Blamires and Holian, The ‘Romance of the Rose’ Illuminated, pp. 72–74.

Translat i ng t he Rose

of Wales, MS 5015D includes an unusually long marginal gloss in red ink alongside a decorated capital beginning the word ‘Narcisus’: ‘la description narcisus et la cause de sa fortune’ (fol. 16r; the description of Narcissus and the cause of his fate). Habitually, this manuscript only glosses characters’ names sporadically in its margins, so that such an extensive gloss renders the moment particularly noteworthy. The Chalon-sur-Saône manuscript gives the line ‘Narcisus fu uns damoisiaus’ a six-line flourished initial, a size used only for major narrative shifts or important moments; the more usual size in this manuscript is three lines (fol. 7r). Comparison with French traditions of decorating and organizing the text of the Rose, then, suggests that the missing ‘Narcissus’ folios from quire four of MS G may well have contained a higher than normal level of decoration, perhaps similar to that now found on fol. 57v of the manuscript. The same is true of the four folios missing from quire 20 of MS G. These folios, which would have come between fols 147 and 148 of MS G, contain most of the narrator’s description of Fauls Semblant and Abstinence Contrainte’s appearance as they encounter Malebouche, and the beginning of their discussion with him. These episodes, once again, are very often highlighted by decoration in manuscripts of the Rose, particularly miniatures depicting the couple dressed in their pilgrims’ garb, and/or in conversation with Malebouche. These are often found at Rose, v. 12,151, ‘Quant li pelerin venu furent’, which would correspond to Romaunt, ed. by Sutherland 7473, ‘Whan the pylgrymes commen were’, now missing from MS G. Ten manuscripts listed on the Roman de la rose digital library insert an illumination at this moment.209 Furthermore, as with the narrative of Narcissus discussed above, many more manuscripts without illuminations, or with illuminations at other points, still choose to mark this moment prominently in different ways, in keeping with their own systems of decoration and textual organization. BnF, MS fr. 802, for example, inserts an illumination of Fauls Semblant and Abstinence Contrainte before Rose, v. 12,033, ‘Or vouz diroi la contenance | De faux semblant et dabstinence’ (fr. 802, fol. 80v; Now I will tell you how Fauls Semblant and Abstinence looked), a moment whose corresponding line in the Romaunt is also decorated with a champ and border (MS G, fol. 147r: ‘Nowe wol I sayn the countynaunce | Of falssemblant and abstynaunce’). The decorator of fr. 802 next inserts an illumination of the two speaking to Malebouche at Rose, v. 12,155, ‘Sire dist constraint abstenence | Por faire nostre penitence’ (fr. 802, fol. 81v; Sir, said Abstinence Contrainte, in order to do our penitence), a line whose translation falls in the missing folios of MS G. In between these two illuminations in fr. 802, four more moments are given two-line flourished initials (executed in blue and red, or gold and dark blue), marking them as further subdivisions in the narrative; one of these four is the line ‘Quant li pelerin venu furent’ (fr. 802, fol. 81v; When the pilgrims had arrived). The other three all mark lines which would also have been translated on the missing folios in MS G. Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Selden Supra 57, similarly, illuminates ‘Or vous dirai la contenance |

209 BnF, MSS fr. 380, 1559, 9345, 12588, 12595; Paris, Assemblée nat., MS 1230; Geneva, Fond. Bodmer, MS Bodmer 79; Châlons-en-Champagne, Bib. mun., MS 270; Arras, Bib. mun., MS 897 and the Ferrell Rose.

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De faux semblant et dabstinance’ (fol. 86r–v), and thereafter uses two-line decorated capitals regularly to distinguish further narrative divisions; there are ten which would decorate the corresponding material in the missing folios of the Romaunt in MS G, including one at ‘Quant li pelerins venuz furent’ (fol. 87r). The placement of champ initials and floral borders within the text of the Romaunt in MS G, like its rubrication and running headers, in fact has sustained correspondences with the patterning of textual divisions as they are created in different ways by scribes and decorators across several Roman de la rose manuscripts. For example, of the first forty decorated initials and borders in MS G, twenty-two are found in exactly the same place as two-line decorated initials with penwork in the corresponding section of the Rose in BnF, MS fr. 24389, a B-manuscript. A further nine are found within a few lines of their placement in this manuscript, clearly marking the same narrative moments. In BnF, MS fr. 2195, twenty-three penwork initials match exactly with the first forty in MS G, and a further six match within a few lines; in BnF, MS fr. 25524, twenty-two match exactly and seven approximately; while in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 2988, these figures rise to twenty-four exact matches and a further six approximate matches. When compared to one another, these Rose-manuscripts show similar kinds of overlap: while their placement of decorative features is certainly not exactly identical at all points, there are nonetheless many moments which are repeatedly marked across several or all of them, suggesting that placement of paratextual features, such as decorated capitals, in Rose-manuscripts was not completely at an individual scribe’s discretion, but was the result of common patterns of layout, decoration, and textual division which were transmitted between manuscript copies.210 The patterns of decorative correspondence between the French manuscript examples which I have examined and MS G suggest that the scribe or overall designer of MS G (or its exemplar) may well have been basing the arrangement and placement of their decorated initials wholly or in part on common layouts of Rose-manuscripts which he or she had seen.

The Romaunt and Chaucer: Two Intertextual Connections In the previous sections of this chapter, my focus has been on using the manuscript of the Romaunt as a way to bring out its participation in traditions of discussing, interpreting, and responding to Le Roman de la rose. What I hope to have shown is that the Romaunt constitutes not a substandard Chaucer production but a translation of the Rose which situates itself alongside other kinds of reworkings of the text: that is to say, a translation which actively engages with the Rose through its translators’ lexical choices, through its particular textual features, and through its manuscript presentation. The Romaunt glosses

210 Kuhn, ‘Die Illustration’, suggests that repeated iconographic trends — for example, in the layout, structure, and framing of opening illuminations — can be perceived across many copies of the Rose. Braet, ‘Du Portrait d’Auteur’, suggests ways in which the composition of Rose opening illuminations itself often mimics earlier established iconographic traditions of depicting the Evangelists, esp. pp. 82–84.

Translat i ng t he Rose

the Rose as part of its own textual rendition of it, creating a Rose-translation which takes into account some of the principal sites of contest that surround the Rose. In the closing section of this chapter, I want to return to the Romaunt’s vexed relationship with Chaucer. The Romaunt-translators, in places, appear to have created intertextual links with aspects of Chaucer’s literary production through their translation of the Rose: more specifically, they appear to deploy moments of intertextual echo to foreground Chaucer’s own engagement with the Rose. These links make for a series of complex moments, which might be (and have been) read in a variety of ways, but which, ultimately, frustrate attempts to pin them definitively into a stable chronology or source-target relationship. The first is the appearance of Chaucer’s Squire in the garden of Déduit. In Section B, four lines of the Romaunt are identified by Sutherland as being without source, an interpolation on the part of the translator, found within Amours’s list of commands to the Lover: For if he can wel [flute] and daunce, It may him greatly do auaunce. Amonge eke, for thy lady sake, Songes and compleyntes that thou make; For that will meuen in her herte, Whan they reden of thy smerte. Loke that no man for scarce the holde...

corresponds to Rose, v. 2209 corresponds to Rose, v. 2210 Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx corresponds to Rose, v. 2211.

(Romaunt, ll. 2323-29 and Rose, vv. 2209-11, ed. by Sutherland) Fleming has discussed these lines, and the Rose passage into which they are inserted in the Romaunt, in the context of Chaucer’s description of the Squire in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales.211 He finds first of all that this section of the Rose, in which Amours’s commandments are detailed, is being employed by Chaucer as subversive hypotext in his portrayal of the Squire.212 However, he goes on to consider specifically the possible implications of this use for the Romaunt. Fleming notes that a version of the lines which appear as interpolated within the Romaunt also appears in the ‘General Prologue’ description of the Squire: He koude songes make and wel endite, Juste and eek daunce, and weel purtreye and write. (‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales, ll. 95–96) He concludes therefore that the B-translator effectively transposed these lines back into his translation of the Rose, having read the Canterbury Tales, and, crucially, recognized

211 Fleming, ‘Chaucer’s Squire’. 212 Phillips, ‘Fortune and the Lady’ probes the ways in which hypo- and hypertexts function to destabilize surface meaning within a model of medieval intertextuality. Phillips in fact discusses closely a second passage of the Rose and the way it is employed by Chaucer in this very fashion to describe the Prioress, pp. 134–35. The section of Amour’s commandments particularly referenced by Chaucer in the description of the Squire is found at Rose, vv. 2193–2208.

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the intertextual reference made to Amours’s commandments in the Rose by Chaucer in his description of the Squire: ‘the suggestion is that the translator of the Romaunt was so familiar with Chaucer’s General Prologue that in translating the “source” of the Squire’s description he added Chaucer’s embellishments’.213 Here, therefore, Fleming outlines a highly complex model of intertextual allusion working between the Romaunt and Chaucer. Chaucer makes use of the Rose to create an initial intertextual relationship, in order to hint at possible meanings located below the surface within the Squire’s section of the ‘General Prologue’. This relationship is then recalled and exploited, effectively in reverse, by the B-translator, who adds an additional reference to Chaucer’s action within his own recasting of the Rose, creating an interpolation which itself intertextually recalls Chaucer’s exploitation of the text, and an echo of Chaucer’s Squire within Amours’s delineation of the behavioural requirements of a lover. A similar interpretation could be applied to the evidence that Geltner has recently explored concerning intertextual relationships between part of Fauls Semblant’s discourse in Section C of the Romaunt and the ‘Summoner’s Tale’. Geltner outlines some of the ways in which Chaucer, within the Canterbury Tales, draws on particular facets of Fauls Semblant’s presentation in the Rose, focusing especially on the ways in which Fauls Semblant’s ‘confession’ to Amours forms a backdrop to the interaction between Chaucer’s Friar and Summoner.214 During his ‘confession’ to Amours, Fauls Semblant refers to all of the people who he has manipulated, conned, and cheated: Tant ai fet, tant ai sermoné, Tant ai pris, tant m’a l’en doné, Touz li mondes par sa folie, Que je meine vie jolie […] Mès, pour ce que confès doit estre Chascuns chascun an son prestre, Vne fois, selonc l’escripture, Ainz qu’i li face sa droiture, Car nous auons.i. priuilege Qui de plusours fais les aliege.215 (So much have I done, so much sermoned, so much have I taken, so much have I been given by all the world, because of their foolishness, that I lead a lovely life. But, each and every person must be confessed by their priest once a year, according to scripture, before taking communion, so we have a privilege, who can absolve them of many things.)

213 Fleming, ‘Chaucer’s Squire’, p. 49. 214 Geltner, ‘Faux Semblants’, pp. 371–76, p. 374. 215 I cite from Roman/Romaunt, ed. by Sutherland, p. 127, vv. (811)-(814) and vv. (9)-(14). As Sutherland notes (note to Rose, v. 11,222 at p. 196), this particular passage is part of a longer interpolated section in Fauls Semblant’s speech which does not appear in all Rose-manuscripts: further evidence that the Romaunt reflects different readings and reimaginings of the Rose. Langlois gives further details about this interpolation: Les manuscrits, pp. 426–30.

Translat i ng t he Rose

As Geltner notes, in the Romaunt, the C-translator ‘sets up a situation similar to the basic plot of the S[ummoner’s] T[ale]’ when translating these lines: on each of the occasions where Fauls Semblant refers to ‘everybody’ (‘Touz li mondes’, ‘chascuns’), the translator amends to give a specific married couple.216 The equivalent lines in the Romaunt read as follows: So haue I preched and eke shriuen, So haue I take, so haue [me] yeuen Through her foly, husbonde and wyfe, That I lede right a ioly lyfe, […] But forasmoche as man and wyfe Shulde shewe her parisshe-preest her lyfe Ones a yere, as saythe the boke, Er any wight his housel toke, Than haue I priuyleges large, That may of moche thyng discharge. (Romaunt, ed. by Sutherland, ll. 6377–88) Geltner argues for a deliberate correspondence between the Summoner’s married couple who take their revenge on a deceitful and self-seeking Friar, and the Romaunt’s conceptualization of Fauls Semblant as just such a Friar, boasting about the way he deceives a married couple. However, unlike Fleming, he places the Romaunt — rather than the Canterbury Tales — in a position of chronological precedence and influence.217 Following Geltner’s reading, Section C of the Romaunt has to have been translated before Chaucer composed the Summoner’s Tale, because Chaucer’s Summoner echoes it in his depiction of his Friar.218 However, the inverse could, surely, equally well be true. The C-translator’s careful alteration of ‘Touz li mondes’ and ‘chascun’ (everyone, each person) to a specific husband and wife — like the addition of ‘songes and compleyntes’ to the list of Amours’s commandments examined by Fleming above — could form a further example of a Romaunt-translator noticing an intertextual use of the Rose made by Chaucer in the Canterbury Tales, and choosing to transpose that connection back into the translation in the form of a reference to the husband, wife, and corrupt Friar of the Summoner’s Tale. Fleming and Geltner’s work, taken together, points up a set of complex intertextual entanglements to do with chronology, precedence, and influence which tie together the Canterbury Tales, the Rose, and the Romaunt. Which came first, the Tales or the Romaunt? 216 Geltner, ‘Faux Semblants’, p. 373. 217 Geltner, ‘Faux Semblants’, pp. 372–73. 218 Presumably, Geltner suggests this because of the conventional early dating of the Romaunt to the 1360s, and because his wider argument about the ways Chaucer exploits different facets of Fauls Semblant in the Summoner’s Prologue and Tale presupposes that he was aware of the Fauls Semblant interpolation, either because he had translated Section C himself or because he had read it; see ‘Faux Semblants’, p. 374. However, this interpolation is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon feature of Rose-manuscripts, so that Chaucer would not have to have been aware of it via the Romaunt, whether his own translation or someone else’s.

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Are these entanglements evidence that Chaucer knew the Romaunt or that he translated it (or Sections A and C of it) himself? And if so, do they suggest that the translation of the Romaunt must be situated early in his poetic career, as the traditional narrative runs, prior to the Tales? Conversely, are they evidence that the B- and C-translators (at least) were familiar with (and writing after) The Canterbury Tales, usually placed at the end of Chaucer’s poetic career — and, therefore, that they were post-Chaucer? If this is the case, do these connections attest to an awareness on the part of the Romaunt’s translators that they are participating in a network of interpretative responses to the Rose, including Chaucer’s? Might the suggestion that the three parts of the Romaunt could have been split for simultaneous translation imply, then, that Chaucer was unlikely to have been any of the three translators? Or might he have participated in such a project towards the end, rather than the start, of his poetic career? The fleeting appearances of Chaucer’s Squire and his Summoner’s fictional Friar within the Romaunt remind us of the limitations of a teleological and Chaucer-centred approach to the text. Attempts to structure the material into a chronological order reveal themselves to be provisional or hypothetical, sometimes contradictory, and not definitive or clear.219 The Romaunt challenges us to conceptualize translation as less simple than a source-to-target, linear movement. Instead, it presents us with textual details, echoes, voices, and presences which pull or point in a number of directions at once. So the appearance and the amorous behaviour of Chaucer’s Squire, himself a version or an embodiment of the Rose’s Amours’s discursively constructed ‘ideal’ lover, is incorporated into the Romaunt by Amours himself as a new behavioural model for the Romaunt’s lover. Likewise, the voice of Chaucer’s Summoner’s fictional Friar can be heard within the voice of the Romaunt’s Fauls Semblant. The presence of these voices and characters within the Romaunt does not fit easily within a teleological framework: Chaucer’s Squire, for example, might here be said to move both ‘forwards’ (‘out’ of the Tales) but also, simultaneously, ‘backwards’, towards his shadowy intertextual predecessor, Amours’s description of the lover he would like to see the Rose’s dreamer become. These entanglements between the Romaunt, the Rose, and Chaucer prompt us to look beyond attempts to identify a section of the Romaunt that can be definitively labelled ‘Chaucer’s translation of the Rose’. They also frustrate constructions of translation as temporally sequenced or teleological. The Romaunt, as this chapter has explored, has more to offer in terms of complex engagement with the Roman de la rose than has hitherto been allowed; localizing Chaucer’s voice within that engagement is surely not (or not the only) salient question.

219 Compare Cooper’s discussion of verbal echoes between the discourses of Fauls Semblant and Raison, on the one hand, and Chaucer’s Pardoner’s self-presentation on the other, Canterbury Tales, p. 261. Cooper finds a correspondence between the Pardoner’s words and the Romaunt, suggesting that Chaucer here borrows from the Romaunt Sections B and C rather than the Rose. However, the Romaunt itself adheres so closely to the phrasing and rhyme words of the Rose in these instances that this kind of distinction would seem problematic to draw. Are these lines, then, evidence of Chaucer using the Rose ‘through’ the Romaunt? Of Chaucer using the Rose to be subsequently echoed by the Romaunt (whether he constructed this echo himself or a different translator did)? Or, of two independently undertaken close rewordings of the Rose?

Chapter 4

Chartier’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy and its Querelle

In the previous chapter, we saw how a sense of the disappointing ‘un-Chaucerian-ness’ of the ‘Chaucerian’ Romaunt of the Rose has led to a kind of critical stasis in which the poem has been conveniently placed on the margins of the Chaucer canon as a deficient and incomplete early Chaucer production — and that this deeply marginal relationship with Chaucer has come to circumscribe the extent of most, if not all, critical engagements with the text. Attempting to undo the effects of the label ‘Chaucerian’, as it is applied to the Romaunt allowed for a reframing of the text in the context of Rose-reception. In the following chapters, I turn to a different kind of Chaucerian text: Richard Roos’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy. The Middle English Belle Dame Sans Mercy, a translation of Alain Chartier’s 1424/25 Belle dame sans mercy, was undertaken by Richard Roos1 some time in the fifteenth century, possibly in the 1440s.2 This fifteenth-century translation is almost universally categorized as ‘Chaucerian’ in a different sense to the Romaunt: imitative or derivative of Chaucer, associated bibliographically with Chaucer, ‘mistaken’ by Chaucer’s early printers for part of the canon of his works. We saw in Chapter 1 that Roos’s translation is often conceptualized as identical to Chartier’s text, as though the change in language from French to English could have no possible impact on the poem. The most recent critic to consider the Belle Dame takes this stance even further, not only implying that the major aim of the translation must be to ‘adequately convey […] the tenor of Chartier’s poem’, but that at times Roos in fact falls short of this aim, so that his translation cannot even be considered as on a par with Chartier’s text: ‘although he can be a very good translator […]



1 The attribution to Roos is usually accepted as genuine; it is found in one manuscript of the English Belle Dame: BL, MS Harley 372: ‘Translatid out of ffrenche by Sir Richard Ros’, fol. 61r. The English Belle Dame is extant in five manuscripts: Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Fairfax 16; Cambridge, UL, MS Ff.1.6 (commonly known as the Findern manuscript); BL, MS Harley 372; Warminster, Longleat House, Marquess of Bath MS 258; and Trinity Coll., Cambridge, MS R.3.19. It was also printed in Richard Pynson’s 1526 Boke of Fame, as we saw in Chapter 1, and in Thynne’s 1532 Workes (which was certainly influenced by Pynson’s 1526 volume). In addition, it is now partially extant (in fragments of a presumably once-complete manuscript) in BL, MS Sloane 1710, which preserves ll. 93–140 and 189–764 of the poem. Extracts from it are copied into BL MS Add. 17492 (commonly known as the Devonshire manuscript). There is evidence of two further, now-lost copies of the Belle Dame in BL, MS Add. 43491, a damaged Paston family book inventory. The inventory reads: ‘a blak boke wyth the legende off lad[…] | saunce mercye þe parlement off byr[…] | Glasse […]’ and ‘a boke lent Midelton’ containing the ‘Bele Da[…] | Mercy’ followed by the ‘parlement off Byrdys’; see Foley, ‘Richard Pynson’s Boke’, p. 79. 2 Chaucerian Dream Visions, ed. by Symons, introduction discusses dating.

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the English poem is inferior to the original […] brilliant poem’.3 Roos’s deviations from this poem are conceptualized as ‘blunting Chartier’s poetic edge’ or ‘feeble lines’.4 Roos’s poem has thus been critically subordinated on two fronts: on the one hand, describing it as ‘Chaucerian’ subordinates it to Chaucer, and on the other, conceptualizing it as mediocre translation subordinates it to Chartier. In neither case is Roos’s translation conceived of as anything more than a lesser imitation of something else. If critics have been reluctant to read the Belle Dame as engaging critically with Chaucer or with Chartier, preferring to read it as derivatively ‘Chaucerian’ and derivatively ‘like’ (albeit not as accomplished as) Chartier, they have been equally reluctant to read it as engaging critically with the French-language texts and traditions which Chartier’s Belle dame produced, and with which it interacts. Chartier’s Belle dame achieved instant popularity, not to say notoriety, principally evidenced by the large number of poetic responses and continuations that were composed by readers, and appended to it in manuscript copies. These responses are now referred to under the general title of the Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy, and some form of this Querelle is transmitted with the French Belle dame in almost all manuscripts which contain it. This fact alone testifies to the amount of contemporary interest generated both by Chartier’s poem, and by the various continuations which make up the Querelle. As Ashby Kinch has recently observed, in translating the Belle dame, Roos could not have ‘failed to realise that he was translating an entire culture of debate, not merely a text’:5 the notoriety of the Querelle, as well as its (often carefully presented) presence within almost all manuscripts which transmit the Belle dame would have been almost impossible to ignore. This chapter revisits that ‘culture of debate’, uncovering the ways in which it explores the overlapping roles of ‘Maistre Alain’, extra-diegetic author and intra-diegetic scribe/translator, and the ways in which it encourages accretion and addition of new interpretative voices. These considerations, I argue, must be attended to if we are to understand Roos’s employment of translation into English as a way of participating in debate about the Belle dame, and to reconsider the question of Roos as a ‘Chaucerian’ poet.





3 Putter, ‘Chaucerian Visions’, p. 150. 4 Putter, ‘Chaucerian Visions’, p. 150. I am thinking particularly here of Putter’s description of Roos’s translation of Belle dame vv. 6–8, which apparently ‘suffer in translation’ (cf. Roos, Belle Dame, ll. 34–36). Consider, for example, Roos’s employment of the metaphor of defeat at chess (l. 7, ‘discomfit and mate’) to translate Chartier’s narrator’s sorrow at the death of his lady. This metaphor is not present in Chartier’s text: is this simply a ‘feeble’ translation or does this insertion connect to important ways of reading the dynamics of Chartier’s poem? Cayley, for example, reads the Belle dame and Querelle through the sustained metaphor of chess-playing, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 164–67, esp. the image from The Hague, KB, MS 71 E 49 of the Lady and her suitor playing chess. Lausanne, Bib. cant. et univ., MS 350, a copy of Chartier’s Belle dame, boasts a fifteenth-century binding which doubles up as a chessboard. 5 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 420.

C h art i e r’s B el l e Dam e S an s Merc y and i t s Q u e re lle

Defining the ‘Culture of Debate’: The Querelle The Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy has recently been the subject of detailed examination in the context of medieval French literary studies, examination which has given rise to important new research into the ways in which Chartier’s readers engaged with his poem, and the key role played by material presentation in manuscript and print in articulating that engagement.6 Roos’s translation, however, has not, until now, been seriously considered as part of this process: the Belle Dame has been most usually thought of in an English context, as a piece of minor Chaucerian apocrypha, as we have seen. As Butterfield has most recently argued, however — and as I have already explored in the context of the Romaunt of the Rose — ‘modern neuroses about linguistic identity’ — and the disciplinary boundaries which now tend to determine the shape of our study of medieval literature — ‘are a falsification of a linguistically plural […] history’.7 The Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy is not, necessarily, separate from England and contemporary English writing because of the language in which it is written: the likelihood, indeed, is that Roos and his readers were very well aware of it; it clearly travelled to readers well beyond the geographical and linguistic area which we now think of as ‘France’. For example, at least one important fifteenth-century manuscript containing the Belle dame and parts of the Querelle alongside Chartier’s Débat du reveille matin and Livre des quatre dames was partially copied and bound in the mid-fifteenth century, in the city state of Fribourg (modern-day Switzerland), where it still remains: Fribourg, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, MS L 1200.8 This manuscript preserves evidence of the area’s bilingual culture and readership: it anthologizes the Querelle alongside verse texts in German. The catch-all term Querelle comprises a large number of texts, some more closely related to the Belle dame than others, most usually found in different groupings within different manuscripts. Critical approaches to the Querelle are, therefore, often rendered complex by its imprecise structure. Hult and McRae, for example, select the version of the Querelle given in one particular manuscript as the object of their edition, on the grounds that gathering texts from many different manuscripts would give an anachronistic reconstruction of a non-existent group of texts.9 It is interesting to note, however, that they feel obliged to give further Querelle-texts from different sources which they consider to be relevant but which are not contained in their chosen manuscript in the form of a ‘dossier’ at the end of the edition. Such a decision on the part of the Querelle’s most recent editors forms a clear demonstration of the extent

6 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, ‘Poetry, Politics and Mastery’, ‘Debating Communities’, ‘Collaborative Communities’, and ‘Polyphonie et dialogisme’; Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae; McRae, ‘The Trials of Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy’ and ‘Cyclification and Circulation’; Hult, ‘Alain Chartier’; Armstrong, The Virtuoso Circle, chap. 1; Robinson, ‘The Manuscript and Print Tradition’ and ‘In the Forest’. 7 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 292. 8 Romain Jurot gives a full description and identification of its fifteenth-century Fribourgeois binding, which it still retains: Catalogue, pp. 252–55. 9 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. lxxi.

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to which interpreting the Querelle is in a large part dependent on particularities of individual manuscript copies: readings of the Querelle are significantly affected by its codicological context and by differing arrangements of the texts, as Cayley has conclusively demonstrated.10 It also demonstrates the difficulties inherent in attempting to contain or pinpoint the structure of the Querelle. In order to tackle these difficulties, Cayley has recently proposed the division of the wide range of texts which make up the Querelle into a series of ‘cycles’ for ease of reference.11 The first cycle consists of texts by, or closely associated with, Chartier himself, while the next three cycles comprise interrelated series of responses, to Chartier’s first cycle and, in varying degrees, to each other. My analysis here will focus on the first and second cycles of the Querelle: Chartier’s own contributions, and a closely linked series of texts which respond to them.

The First Cycle The Querelle’s first cycle is ‘bookended’ by two texts by Chartier. It consists of the Belle dame itself, then two short prose letters. These are usually entitled the Coppie de la lettre envoyee par les dames a Maistre Alain (copy of the letter sent by the ladies to Maistre Alain, hereafter la lettre) and the Coppie de la requeste faicte et baillee aux dames contre Maistre Alain (copy of the letter made and sent to the ladies against Maistre Alain, hereafter la requeste). Both documents were purportedly written by ladies and gentlemen of the court during Chartier’s lifetime, as a ‘real-time’ response to the Belle dame, although they were in fact very possibly composed later in the poem’s transmission history, in the early 1440s.12 La lettre is addressed to Chartier himself; its female authors claim to be admirers of Chartier’s writing, and express concern that he has been vilified in a second communication addressed to them by a certain group of male suitors. This communication — la requeste — contains a critique of ‘[le] livre que on appelle La belle dame sans mercy’ (l. 24; the book that is called La belle dame sans mercy) on the grounds that it may ‘rompre la queste des humbles servans, et a vous tollir l’eureux non de Pitié’ (ll. 26–27; destroy the quest [for love] of your humble servants, and remove the name of Pity from you). La requeste is appended by Chartier’s female supporters to la lettre in order that he may ‘[se] desfendre de ceste charge’ (l. 6; defend himself against this charge). These two letters are most usually followed in manuscripts by Chartier’s response-poem, the Excusacion aux dames, apparently written as a direct response to the criticisms outlined in the two prose letters. The God of Love appears to the narrator in a vision, and castigates him for composing the Belle dame, claiming that

10 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 162–88. 11 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 137–40. 12 I discuss the scribal presentation and argue for a possible origin for the letters in Charles d’Orléans’s milieu at Blois in Robinson, ‘In the Forest’. McRae argues that the Querelle may have taken place later in the fifteenth century than many have assumed, ‘Piecing the Puzzle’.

C h art i e r’s B el l e Dam e S an s Merc y and i t s Q u e re lle

‘chacun m’en fait les clamours’ (v. 46; everyone is complaining to me about it [the Belle dame]). The final text in the first cycle is a rare verse letter, La Responce des dames faicte a maistre Allain. It is extant in only four manuscripts,13 and it comprises the very negative and inflammatory response of some unidentified ladies to the Excusacion.14 The extremely limited circulation of the Responce, when compared with the very wide circulation of the other texts in the first cycle, would tend to suggest that it was composed later than the rest of this cycle, perhaps by a third party taking their cue from the two prose letters. The first cycle of the Querelle is most usually transmitted alongside various permutations of the second and further Querelle-cycles within collected anthology manuscripts, which often contain still more texts by Chartier and others.15 The first four texts of the first cycle — the Belle dame, la lettre, la requeste, and the Excusacion — are very often found together in manuscript anthologies16 in the order given, a fact which supports a reading of them as a discrete narrative ‘unit’ of the Querelle. Often, manuscript presentation makes the narrative interconnections within this first cycle of texts clear. BnF, MS 2230, for example, does not provide the Belle dame with an explicit at fol. 137v, where it ends, although it does mark the endings of previous works; at fol. 120v the words ‘Cy finist le liure des quatre dames’ (here ends the book of the four ladies) mark the close of Chartier’s Livre des quatre dames. La requeste follows immediately after the close of the Belle dame, on the same page, and the first letter of its first word, ‘[s]upplient’ ([they] beg) is given a small decorated capital and a small amount of border decoration but is not as markedly distinguished as earlier texts in the volume. The Belle dame itself, for example, is given a more lavish border and opening initial at fol. 121r, in line with the opening folios of other texts. La lettre has no decorated capital or border, and the Excusacion has similar decoration at its opening to la requeste. Most tellingly,

13 These are Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 3521; Besançon, Bib. mun. MS 554; Fribourg, Bib. cant. et univ., MS L 1200 (in which the Responce is now incomplete due to lost leaves); and Arnhem, Bib., MS 79. 14 Solterer, The Master and Minerva, pp. 193–96 gives a close reading of the Responce. The two prose letters are also transmitted very occasionally in verse: relevant manuscripts are discussed in Robinson, ‘In the Forest’. 15 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, chap. 4 discusses the Querelle’s manuscript context; compare her extremely useful manuscript tables; Debate and Dialogue, appendices A and B. See also ‘Polyphonie et dialogue’ on anthologizing the Querelle with other texts. 16 For manuscripts of the Belle dame and the Querelle, the standard work remains Poetical Works, ed. by Laidlaw. Laidlaw lists forty-four Belle dame manuscripts (p. 328). One new manuscript containing the Belle dame has been discovered by Joan E. McRae since Laidlaw’s publication: Hatfield House, Cecil Papers 297 (discussed by McRae, ‘A Community of Readers’, p. 202). Additionally, Fribourg, Bib. cant. et univ., MS L 1200, which was catalogued by Laidlaw in Poetical Works (MS Qj, p. 128) but not included in his forty-four manuscripts of the Belle dame, is nonetheless a Belle dame manuscript: it opens with a now-incomplete copy of the poem, having lost its first five folios, but clearly contained a full copy when they were present. There is thus a current total of forty-six known manuscripts of Chartier’s poem. The Jonas-IHRT/CNRS database gives this figure as forty-nine, three more; two of these are, however, now lost (Turino, Bib. nat. and univ. MS L.IV.03 and Lyon, bib. mun. MS 744bis), and the third (BnF MS fr. 1169) does not, as far as I am aware, in fact contain Chartier’s poem. (Cayley, ‘Collaborative Communities’ discusses this manuscript in detail).

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at the close of the Excusacion (fol. 144v), the scribe has added the words ‘Explicit liure de la belle dame sans mercy’ (explicit the book of the belle dame sans mercy). Clearly, he or she regarded the Belle dame, la lettre, la requeste, and the Excusacion as one ‘liure’ or sequential, interdependent group of texts, the ordering and decoration of which was carefully thought out and uniformly maintained. This decorative scheme demonstrates a keen awareness of the narrative interdependence of the two letters, and of the fiction which links them to each other, to the Belle dame, and to the Excusacion.

The Belle dame and the Excusacion: Chartier’s Provocative Lady The content and structure of the Belle dame itself is well known: an unnamed male narrator, sorrowful about his own lady’s death, is drawn into a feast where he overhears a lovelorn young man, the Lover, attempting to persuade a lady to grant him her love in return. From the twenty-fifth stanza of the poem to the ninety-sixth, the narrator effectively disappears from the picture, transcribing the debate he overhears in alternating stanzas between the Lover and the Lady, as the Lover lays out increasingly desperate pleas (then distinctly uncourtly abuse) and the Lady remains immovable. She has the last word, as far as their conversation is concerned, dismissing the Lover summarily: De tant redire m’ennoyés, Car je vous en ay assés dit (vv. 767–68). (I’m fed up with having to tell you over and over again, since I’ve said enough already.) The poem is then closed by the narrator, who briefly describes the grief-stricken Lover’s reaction, hints that his frustration is so great that he (perhaps?) died of it, and adds an address to lovers and their ladies, imploring the latter not to behave like the Lady, to whom he gives the name ‘la belle dame sans mercy’. The Lady is of course not the first female literary character within the courtly tradition to reject her suitor mercilessly; as Hult points out, ‘dès les premiers troubadours, les éléments essentiels de cette éthique et de ce code […] sont mis en place. […] La dame sans pitié […] est une figure importante dès l’aube de la tradition [de fin’ amor]’ (From the first troubadours, the essential elements of this ethic and this code are put in place. The pitiless lady is an important figure right from the dawn of the tradition [of fin’ amor]).17 The differences which set apart Chartier’s Lady from her pitiless forebears are at once generally contextual and specific to the poem. Contextually speaking, the rise and development of the literary querelle during the fifteenth century, and growing awareness of the ways in which it could be used as a

17 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, pp. xxxi–xxxii.

C h art i e r’s B el l e Dam e S an s Merc y and i t s Q u e re lle

space to interrogate the concept of literary authority18 form a climate in which a belle dame sans mercy has the potential to become more than the traditional pitiless lady for whose favour a lover must beg. Hult observes that within the poem ‘la réponse de la dame […] a pour effet d’enlever toute efficacité au scenario dicté par la rhétorique traditionnelle. […] Elle démantèle les implications de ce lieu commun du discours courtois masculin: il faut aimer celui qui vous aime’ (The effect of the lady’s response is to remove all the efficacy from the usual scenario dictated by traditional rhetoric. She dismantles the implications of a masculine courtly discourse’s [central] truism: that a woman must love the man who loves her).19 In this way the Lady’s actions can be seen to have a far-reaching and profound effect: her refusal to engage with the Lover using the courtly language in which he attempts to woo her constitutes a challenge to courtly and literary expectations. Indeed, as many have argued, it also constitutes a specific critique of such language and rhetoric.20 In refusing to conform to a typically courtly mode of behaviour and grant the Lover her love, and in calmly persisting in her denials in the face of his pleas, the Lady overturns the very literary traditions and texts which formed her. Similarly, the increasingly abusive and violent rhetoric which the Lover is forced to produce in an attempt to change her mind21 undermines the notion that a persistent and faithful lover must necessarily be deserving of his lady’s love. In deviating from the literary model of the courtly woman who eventually takes pity on her deserving lover, Chartier challenges the primacy of literary authority, leaving the way clear for the ‘material collaboration’22 of other contributors in a debate which encompasses not just the issue of the dame’s pitiless behaviour, but also the very nature of authorship and textual production, as the fate of the Belle dame is written and rewritten by each subsequent participant in the Querelle. Cayley states of the Querelle de la Rose that its scholarly participants ‘colluded in an elaborate literary game […] generating collaborative fictions that were to characterise late medieval poetic production’,23 and it is precisely this kind of ‘collaborative

18 We saw in Chapter 2 how such an interrogation is achieved by Christine and her opponents within the earlier Querelle de la Rose. Solterer acknowledges the common ground between the Querelle de la Rose and the Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy, The Master and Minerva, chap. 7; as does Taylor, ‘Embodying the Rose’. 19 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. xli. 20 Most recently Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 115–21. 21 For example Belle dame, vv. 689–90: ‘Ha! Cuer plus dur que le noir marbre | En qui Mercy ne peust entrer’ (Ha! A heart harder than black marble, into which mercy cannot enter), or vv. 739–40: ‘Pitie, Justice et Droit | Sont de cuer de dame banniz’ (Pity, Justice and Right are banished from ladies’ hearts). 22 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 190. 23 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 85. Taylor discusses similar ‘collaborative fictions’, The Making of Poetry, esp. pp. 112–14, where she concentrates on Charles d’Orléans’s personal manuscript: BnF, MS fr. 25458. She draws attention to the manuscript’s ‘identity as a place of record, a source of inspiration for collaborators […] who thereby acquire a group identity [as] […] knowing and responsive readers and […] co-creators in what amounts to a collaborative artistic and social production’, p. 112.

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fiction’ that Chartier seeks quite specifically to provoke within the Belle dame. His studied ambivalence at the close of the poem concerning the guilt or otherwise of its protagonist provides a guarantee that all avenues for continuation and rewriting are left wide open. Chartier was extremely careful not to close down the possibility of many divergent interpretations for his text, nor to indicate definitively which of them he himself espoused, and it is principally this open-endedness which enabled the Querelle to proliferate as it did; and similar open-endedness, as Cayley and Armstong have shown, is also a feature of virtually all second-cycle Querelle-texts.24 The narrator’s statement, for example, that ‘on me rapporta […] [q]u’il en estoit mort de courrous’ (vv. 781–84; I was told that he was dead of grief, my emphasis) hints that the Lover may not in fact be dead of grief at all; the poet only heard this from an unnamed third party. Indeed, although the word ‘courrous’ is usually read as ‘misery’ or ‘grief ’ (Hult and McRae, for example, translate as ‘chagrin’), it is in fact a polysemous term which also connotes anger and resentment.25 Did the Lover’s sorrow kill him, or his rage? Similarly, Chartier’s build-up of qualifying phrases before the final condemnation of the dame as ‘sans mercy’ serves to destabilize the application of this label: Celle que m’oyéz nommer cy C’on peust appeler, se me semble, La belle dame sans mercy! (ll. 797–800) (She whom you hear me name here, who, it seems to me, may be called la belle dame sans mercy!) In the previous chapter, we saw how speaker markers, very often in the form of rubrics, were a common feature of Rose-manuscripts, enabling and encouraging readers to respond to the complex layering of narrative voices within the text. Speaker markers form a similarly important part of the transmission tradition of the Belle dame sans mercy. Most manuscripts contain them at the beginning of each stanza of the overheard conversation, differentiating the ‘l’amant’ and ‘la dame’.26 A third marker, ‘l’acteur’, is also often added to the last four stanzas, when the narrator makes his reappearance having not spoken in his own voice since stanza twenty-five.27 Aside from their obvious practical purpose to aid readers in keeping track of the argument between the Lover and the Lady, these markers

24 Cayley, ‘Drawing Conclusions’, Debate and Dialogue, p. 144, and Armstrong, ‘The Deferred Verdict’. 25 See DMF courroux, sense A) Chagrin, affliction, trouble; sense B) Colère, indignation, ressentiment. 26 See for example the speaker markers in the copies of the Belle dame found in BnF, MSS fr. 1727, fols 5v–15r, fr. 20026, fols 1r–17v and fr. 2230, fols 121r–136v; Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun. A.6.91, fols 81r–97v; Fribourg, Bib. univ. et cant., MS L 1200, fols 6r–17v or those in BL, MS Royal 19 A III, fols 1r–15r. 27 Compare the distinctions often made in manuscripts of Machaut’s verse, particularly the narrative dits, in which different speakers are often labelled. Butterfield describes some of these labels, highlighting the distinction drawn between ‘Guillaume’ and ‘L’acteur’ in the copy of the Jugement du roi de Navarre found in BnF, MS fr. 1587 as ‘particularly interesting, in the way that it recognises the persona of the poet as a separate voice within the poet’s own text’, ‘Mise-en-page’, pp. 67–68. BnF, MSS fr. 20026 and 2230, a pair of related manuscripts which belonged to Marie de Clèves and Marguerite

C h art i e r’s B el l e Dam e S an s Merc y and i t s Q u e re lle

demonstrate a keen awareness on the part of readers and scribes of the ways in which the different voices within the poem shift, and the fact that the reader witnesses the discussion between the two characters through the narrator: the different layers of the narrative (the narrator speaking to reader versus narrator transmitting the voices of the characters) are articulated visually on the page.28 Marking this movement back to the narrator’s voice also draws particular attention to the way in which the voice of the ‘acteur’ returns at the close of the poem to apply the provocative label ‘sans mercy’ to the Lady: the application of this label, and its justification, will come to be one of the central themes of the Querelle. The narrator uses the verb ‘nommer’ in the last stanza of the text to refer to this designation (v. 798), demonstrating the way that a ‘non’ or name, and acts of naming or applying a ‘non’ can materially shape a reputation: the dame will spend the rest of her (literary) life losing and regaining her ‘renon’ as ‘sans mercy’, as the Querelle repeatedly reinscribes and reinterprets her words and her behaviour. She herself refers to losing her ‘renon’ (reputation), rhymed with ‘non’ (name), at stanza fifty-four of the Belle dame (vv. 425–32), and this pairing is picked up within subsequent cycles of the Querelle, particularly the second; the verb ‘nommer’ (to name) and its synonyms, and various punning combinations of the nouns ‘nom / renom / renommée’ (name, reputation, fame) recur repeatedly. The third text in the second cycle, the Cruelle femme en amours, for example, at stanza ninety-seven uses a corresponding group of rhyme words: ‘pennon / renon / non / sournon’ (vv. 769–76; banner, reputation, name, nickname). The preceding text, the Dame lealle en amours features a similar collocation of verbs, rather than nouns, at its hundredth stanza: ‘honneur reparee / appellee / renommee / surnommee’ (vv. 793–800, reinstated honour / called / good reputation / nicknamed). The narrator’s decision to ‘name’ the Lady, and the careful emphasis he places on this ambiguous act of naming, form a spur to future poets to ‘name’ her in turn: a poetic challenge which will be taken up in the Querelle. Chartier follows up this presentation of the Lady’s guilt within the Excusacion, in which he ostensibly clarifies, but actually complicates further the question of his authorial role and intentions within the Belle dame. Its narrator, indeed, promises at its close that ‘Je […] respondray par escript’ (v. 224; I will reply in writing) to detractors of the Belle dame, a self-reflexive move which at once draws attention to the Excusacion itself as Chartier’s written response to his own creation, and projects forward to other, imagined future texts which will be written, and which thus prefigure the collaborative structure of the Querelle. In a sequence of two crucial

de Rohan (wives of the brothers Charles d’Orléans and Jean d’Angoulême respectively) both anthologize Machaut’s Jugement du roi de Behaingne with works by Chartier, including the first cycle of the Querelle; see McRae, Alain Chartier and the Quarrel, pp. 28–33. 28 Compare Echard’s comments upon the varying effects similar speaker markers have on presentation of Gower’s Confessio Amantis: ‘Dialogues and Monologues’, p. 64 on ‘the visual impact of the dialogic dimension of the poem’. Butterfield notes the ways in which some manuscripts of Machaut’s Remede de fortune present its dialogue so that it looks ‘like a play text’, with speaker markers sometimes interrupting lines of text, ‘Mise-en-page’, p. 67 and also ‘Articulating the Author’, p. 90.

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stanzas, which merit quotation in full, Chartier’s narrator defends himself against the charges levelled by the God of Love at his ‘maleureux livre’ (v. 27; unhappy book). In at least one Querelle-manuscript, the first of these stanzas is given a decorated capital letter at its start, presumably as a way of signalling the sequence’s importance, since decorated capitals are not used for the beginning of any of the other stanzas of the Excusacion in this manuscript:29 Mon livret, qui poy vault et monte, A nesune aultre fin ne tent Si non a recorder le compte D’ung triste amoureux mal content Qui prie et plaint que trop actent, Et comme Reffus le reboute. Et qui aultre chose y entent, Il y voit trop ou n’y voyt goute […] Puis que son mal luy a fait dire, Et aprés luy pour temps passer J’ay voulu ses plaintes escripre Sans ung seul mot en trespasser, S’en doibt tout le monde amasser Contre moy, a tort et en vain, Pour le chetif livre casser Dont je ne suis que l’escripvain? (vv. 193–200; 209–16) (My little book, which is unimportant and worthless, was written with no other intention than to record the story of a miserable and unhappy lover who complains of having had to wait too long, and how Refusal rebuffs him. Whoever understands anything else from it sees either too much or nothing at all […] Because his unhappiness made him say all that he did, and because, to pass the time, I wanted to write down his complaints, without missing a word, must the whole world unite against me, without reason and unfairly, to crush the feeble little book, of which I am in any case only the copyist?) As Cayley notes, ‘literary continuations and responses tend to emphasize the irresolution of the text they continue, and were a frequent medieval phenomenon’.30 Perhaps equally prevalent was the so-called humility topos, through which an author may disingenuously absolve him- or herself of all responsibility for the content of a text by claiming that he or she is (in the narrator’s words) ‘que l’escripvain’ (only the scribe) and that the text itself was originally written — or, in this case, spoken — by

29 Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun. A.6.91, at fol. 103v. 30 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 122.

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someone else.31 By claiming that he wanted to ‘escripre […] ses plaintes […] pour temps passer’ (transcribe his pleas in order to pass the time), Chartier as author-narrator slyly displaces blame and responsibility for any sentiments which displease Amours within the Belle dame onto his own fictional character, the Lover. Through ‘Alain’, the narrator of the Excusacion, Chartier also highlights the ambiguities in role between a narrator, a scribe, and an author: ‘Alain’, ‘escripvain’ (scribe) of the Belle dame, both is, and is not Alain Chartier, author. The status of the author in relation to his fictional creations was to become a key theme in later contributions to the Querelle, in particular those of Achille Caulier, in whose Ospital d’amour Chartier becomes a fictional character alongside the Lover from the Belle dame.32 The recently rediscovered ‘Clumber manuscript’, a deluxe, vellum codex anthologizing the Belle dame and parts of the Querelle with other works by Chartier and others, features an unparalleled series of miniatures, including five relating to Querelle-texts.33 The miniature illustrating the start of the Belle dame in this manuscript (found on fol. 94v and reproduced in the 2016 Christie’s sale catalogue) expresses the fruitful tension set up by Chartier between scribe, author, and fictional character clearly. Divided into three sequential sections, it first shows the narrator arriving on horseback at the gathering where he will encounter the Lover and the Lady, then the narrator observing their shared dance just prior to their debate, and finally the debate scene itself, in which the narrator can be seen crouching between the debaters, hidden behind the trellis, pen in hand, in the very act of noting down what they say. In the first two sections of this illumination, the narrator figure wears similar dress to the other characters with whom he appears. However, in the third, his clothing changes. In place of the secular, courtly dress of the previous two sections, he wears the red robes and cap of the university scholar. At the very moment at which he apparently becomes the inter-diegetic scribe, he simultaneously becomes Chartier the auctor, possessing a particular extra-diegetic identity, role, and cultural freight which exist outside the narrative of the Belle dame. This illuminator, in other words, exposes visually at the start of the Belle dame the sleight of hand which will be performed in the Excusacion: the narrator in this image is a seamless blend of auctor and scribe. The references throughout the Excusacion to the smallness and insignificance of the ‘livret qui poy vault’ (vv. 193, 124; small booklet of little worth) reinforce the narrator’s self-characterization as humble scribe; indeed, specific vocabulary dealing with the composition, production, and dissemination of written texts reoccurs

31 This technique is, of course, most famously used in French by Jean de Meun to pre-emptively defend himself against charges of anti-feminism within the Rose; see for example vv. 15,222–24, ‘as aucteurs vous en prenez | Qui en leurs livres ont escrites | Les paroles que j’en ai dites’ (blame the authors in whose books are written the things I have said). Cf. Solterer, The Master and Minerva, p. 187. 32 Ospital, in Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, vv. 425–40. 33 The Clumber Park Chartier manuscript was sold in 1937 at Sotheby’s and was thereafter untraceable until it reappeared on the market in May 2016 at Christie’s. It is now Yale, Beinecke Lib. MS Beinecke 1216. Poetical Works, ed. by Laidlaw, pp. 131–32 gives details concerning the 1937 sale, while the recent Christie’s sale catalogue provides information about the 2016 auction: Illuminated Manuscripts from the Collection of Maurice Burrus.

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regularly throughout the poem. Amours, for example, challenges his ‘desloyal servant’ that ‘Tu faiz et escrips et envoyes | Nouveaulx livres contre mes droiz’ (vv. 15–24; disloyal servant, you make/compose and write and send out new books against my laws), and the tripartite construction of the first line separates the three stages of textual production clearly from one another. The narrator is accused not only of the ‘escripre’ or ‘copying’ stage, but also of the initial composition of the text, and, crucially, its wide dissemination as well: a dissemination that the Excusacion will do nothing to limit. These references to the copying and dissemination of texts prefigure the thematic centrality of the manuscript book to the Querelle as it develops. Querelle-manuscripts form, in Cayley’s terms, the ‘material loci’ in which different contributions to the Querelle are gathered, and in which different readings of the Lady thus play out. The statement that ‘qui aultre chose y entent | Il y voit trop ou n’y voyt goute’ (vv. 199–200; whoever understands anything else from it sees too much or nothing at all) constitutes a second displacement of responsibility on the part of the narrator, this time onto his readers, who, in order to interpret correctly, must neither read too little, nor too much into the text. The narrator remains stubbornly silent as to precisely what ‘too little’ or ‘too much’ entails, and, of course, in shifting interpretative responsibility to ‘read’ the Lady accurately onto his audience, he implicitly admits — indeed, highlights — the fact that divergent interpretations of her are more than possible, and encourages a reader to look for them. Furthermore, the Excusacion concludes with a postponement of closure, as the narrator’s guilt is ultimately left to dames everywhere to decide (vv. 229–32): the supposedly definitive resolution of this question is left as disparate and plural as the audience. Although, therefore, ostensibly an apology for offending, a defence of authorial motives, and a clarification of authorial purposes within the Belle dame, the Excusacion in fact perpetuates, rather than closes down debate — as the existence of the second cycle makes abundantly clear.

The Second Cycle The second cycle of Querelle-texts have been described by Cayley as ‘fictional, poetic responses to [the first cycle] […] in which the Dame is tried before a series of courts of law’.34 Three of these texts form a central chronological sequence in the cycle. Baudet Herenc’s Accusations contre la Belle dame sans mercy, the anonymous Dame lealle en amours, and Achille Caulier’s Cruelle femme en amours. Each of these texts responds specifically and explicitly both to the first cycle and to preceding second-cycle texts through citation and careful intertextual reference. Chartier’s Lady is tried and retried before a series of judges for her part in her putative Lover’s death, and, crucially, Chartier’s original text is produced as evidence for both prosecution

34 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 137–41 on second cycle, cited at p. 137.

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and defence within these new poetic fictions, which almost always survive copied into manuscripts alongside each other and the first cycle of the Querelle. Chartier is twice cited at two different trials,35 firstly in defence of the Lady, then in defence of the Lover. Within the Dame lealle, he is castigated for having copied down and disseminated a conversation without knowing the full details behind the Lady’s behaviour. Interestingly, at vv. 601–08, the issue of Chartier’s responsibility as ‘que l’escripvain’ (only the copyist; a direct quotation from the Excusacion) is explicitly addressed, and the distinction is drawn by Vérité (‘Truth’, here pleading the Lady’s case) between the transcription of the overheard conversation between the Lover and the Lady, and the damaging label sans mercy which is applied to the Lady at the end of the poem, when ‘acteur se fourma’ (v. 608; he [the narrator] made himself into the author, took the role of author). Chartier’s provocative act of naming is thus marked out — in a similar way to the way in which speaker marker rubrics highlight it on the manuscript page — as something which he ‘added’ to the text from his own initiative, something for which he bears responsibility, and which goes beyond the act of ‘recording’ the utterances of others. Within the Cruelle femme, however, Chartier is introduced, effectively, as a witness for the prosecution. Vérité here is ‘bien informé’ of the Lady’s guilt ‘Par ung tresnotable escripvain […] Qui vit et ouy tout aplain’ (vv. 466–68; by a notable and reliable copyist […] who saw and heard everything). Manuscripts which transmit these poems very often reflect their narrative interconnection visually, as happens with first-cycle texts. The Fribourg manuscript, for example, transmits these three second-cycle poems following on from the first cycle, and it provides a series of rubrics making their relationships to one another plain. The Accusations, the first text of the second cycle, is concluded with the words: ‘Explicit comment la belle dame sans mercy fut jugie et accuse devant amours et appellee la cruelle femme en amours’ (fol. 56v; Explicit how the belle dame sans mercy was judged and accused in front of amours and called the cruel lady in love), referring back to the Belle dame itself, and forward to the Cruelle femme en amours, the third text in the second cycle. The Dame lealle, which replies to the Accusations, is entitled by the scribe ‘ly second livre sur la belle dame […] appellee la leale dame en amours’ (fol. 57r; the second book about the belle dame […] called the loyal lady in love), while the Cruelle femme is entitled ‘ly tier livre fait sur la belle damme […] et comment ly jugement cy devant de la leale damme fu reprouve’ (fol. 75r; the third book made about the belle dame […] and how the foregoing judgement of the loyal lady was overturned). The scribe is equally attentive to signalling links between first-cycle texts; the Responce des dames, which replies to Chartier’s Excusacion, is entitled ‘une livre transmise par les dames a masitre Alain quant il ne volist revocquer la belle dame et est quasi un deffiemant’ (fol. 30r; a book transmitted by the ladies to maistre Alain when he did not want to revoke the belle dame, and it is almost a challenge). The Excusacion is labelled

35 La Dame lealle, in Le Cycle, ed by Hult and McRae, vv. 409–32 and onwards, and La Cruelle femme, in Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, vv. 465–504.

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‘faicte par ledit maistre Alain sur ces presentes’ (fol. 24v; made by the said maistre Alain about these present texts), i.e. the preceding two letters and the Belle dame. In the Fribourg manuscript, then, we have a scribe whose interest in the texts clearly revolves around their cohesiveness as an extended debate narrative centring around the Lady, and responding to each other. The final Querelle-text which I want to consider, the Ospital d’amour, does not belong in the second cycle, in a narrative sense. It is not a trial narrative: its narrator is a lovelorn refused suitor whose dream of Love’s hospital is recorded in the bulk of the poem. It does not fit explicitly into a chronological sequence, as the three texts I discuss above do. However, it was composed by Achille Caulier, who also contributed the Cruelle femme en amours to the second cycle, and it travels with first- and second-cycle texts in the vast majority of its manuscripts, indicating that readers perceived it as closely linked to these texts. Cayley describes it as ‘an innovative text, which, while adopting many of the conventions of previous Querelle poems, introduces a number of new metaphors’.36 One of its most striking moments — in which it reprises the second-cycle texts which cite Chartier’s Belle dame as evidence in their legal proceedings — comprises a description of Chartier’s own tomb, alongside that of his fictional Lover, in the ‘cymentiere […] [des] vraiz et loyaulx amoureux’ (v. 401-02; the cemetery of true and loyal lovers). Caulier’s vision of Chartier’s tomb reveals the way in which the Belle dame has come, through the Querelle, to be more than ‘Chartier’s’ text. In Caulier’s poem, Chartier is transformed into a fictional character alongside the Lady, and his role as apparently blameless scribe or transmitter of information is underlined, even as his status as her authorial creator is simultaneously made plain: Par luy [Chartier] fut sceü le meffait De celle qui l’amant occy, Qu’il appella, quant il ot fait, La Belle Dame sans Mercy. (vv. 429–32) (By him was made known the crime of she who killed the lover, she whom he called, once he had finished/made [it], the belle dame sans mercy). Caulier embeds a dead, silenced Chartier into his dream-narrative, yet in a manner which also draws attention to his superlative status as originator of the Belle dame and, through his act of naming, the Querelle. He simultaneously draws attention to Chartier’s poetic reputation: Chartier’s tomb itself is extensively described (vv. 433–40), and features ‘l’art de rethorique’ (the art of rhetoric) written in golden letters upon it. This powerful epitaph underlines Chartier’s pre-eminence as poet outside the fiction of the Querelle even as he is also entombed within it.

36 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 154.

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The Influence of the Querelle David Hult has noted that ‘la plupart du temps, lire la Belle Dame voulait dire, lire le cycle de la Belle Dame’.37 The influence and notoriety of the Querelle which followed Chartier’s opening poem cannot be underestimated. The fact that Chartier composed the Excusacion, which opens the Querelle to the participation of others testifies to his interest in instigating a ‘culture of debate’. Hult has emphasized that, despite the fact that Chartier wrote many other works, both in French verse and prose and in Latin, ‘ce fut la Belle Dame qui assure sa renommée et sa posterité comme auteur et comme poète d’amours (ou, faut-il dire, comme poète d’amours et donc comme auteur)’.38 The distinction made here is crucial for the premises of this study: one of the central themes of the Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy is the linking of ‘amours’, more specifically women and their behaviour in love, with literary authority and hermeneutic practice: the ways those women are constructed and read. The wide circulation of the Querelle and its numerous and varied contributions demonstrate that fifteenth-century readers and continuators were clearly keen to explore the wider implications in terms of literary authority that could be drawn from the well-known figure of the pitiless woman. Such concerns resonate strongly with the ways in which writers such as Chaucer approached this topic in England, and were fully appreciated by Roos when he undertook his translation. I want to conclude this discussion of the terms, articulation, and influence of the Querelle with a closer investigation of a particular Querelle-manuscript, BL, MS Royal 19 A III. My discussion of this codex exposes the extent to which this collection of texts cannot adequately be circumscribed by national or disciplinary boundaries between ‘English’ and ‘French’ writing, and it forms a significant backdrop to my exploration of Roos’s translation of the Belle dame. BL, MS Royal 19 A III is a Querelle-manuscript which dates to the second half of the fifteenth century. It contains two Querelle-texts: the Belle dame sans mercy and Herenc’s Accusations.39 It also contains Chartier’s Breviaire des nobles, and several other pieces which very often travel in manuscripts with the Belle dame and other Querelle-texts, including the Débat du cœur et de l’œil and the Serviteur sans guerdon.40 The Belle dame opens the Royal manuscript, followed by the Accusations. The text of the Accusations is incomplete following the loss of the first leaf of the quire which contains it; it thus opens at stanza seven. It is, however,

37 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. xxx. 38 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. xxx. 39 Full contents of the Royal manuscript are as follows: 1) La Belle dame sans mercy, 2) O bewtie pereles and right so womanhod, 3) Les Accusations contre la belle dame sans mercy, 4) Le Débat du cœur et de l’œil, 5) Le Breviaire des nobles, 6) Le Congié d’amours, 7) Le Pris donneur, 8) Le Serviteur sans guerdon, 9) Les Traitz et esbatements d’entre l’omme et la femme. 40 The Débat du cœur et de l’œil by the Burgundian poet Michault Taillevent and the anonymous Serviteur sans guerdon both appear in several other manuscripts anthologized alongside Chartier works and Querelle-texts. One example is BnF, MS fr. 2264, which pairs the Serviteur with the Débat alongside the Belle dame and parts of the Querelle. Cayley, ‘Polyphonie et dialogue’, esp. appendix IV discusses further examples.

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named ‘les accusations contre la Belle dame sans mercy’ in its explicit (fol. 28r; the accusations against the belle dame sans mercy), indicating that both scribe and readers would certainly have been aware of the intimate narrative connection between it and the text which precedes it. The manuscript also contains a short, anonymous English poem, copied on the back of the final folio of this manuscript’s copy of the Belle dame (fol. 16v), between the Belle dame and Herenc’s Accusations. Its content and its physical placement in the Royal manuscript both suggest keenness on the part of whoever wrote it to participate in the Querelle. The Royal manuscript has been described by Boffey as one of several ‘unspectacular paper copies of French dits and dream poems [which] can […] be traced in English hands’.41 Its existence is therefore important insofar as it demonstrates conclusively that there was a readership for the Querelle in England during the second half of the fifteenth century.42 Such a readership is also attested to by the survival of a booklist belonging to John Howard, duke of Norfolk, whose household book for the years 1481–83 has a list of literary works scribbled onto its final page. This list includes both ‘la belle d. s. mercy’ and ‘Les Accusations de la d.’: the same texts as are included in the Royal manuscript.43 Crawford assumes that this list refers to an inventory of twelve books taken by Norfolk on a naval expedition in 1481;44 considering some of the texts, however, it seems more plausible that it constitutes a contents list for a particular volume or volumes. A further possibility is that some of the texts mentioned in the list were kept individually in booklet form, and that the list refers to a series of booklets or unbound quires. The Royal manuscript is copied on paper apart from the outer leaves of the first quire (the quire containing the Belle dame; fols 1 and 16), which are vellum. Each text in the manuscript originally took up a single quire, and the Belle dame’s quire is now the only one to have a vellum outer bifolium. However, the second quire, containing Herenc’s Accusations, is missing its outer bifolium. The Accusations are copied by the same hand as the Belle dame; if they were also copied with the same quire design in mind, then the outer bifolium of the Accusations quire could also have been made of vellum. When copying the Belle dame quire, the scribe begins the text on the very first (vellum) folio; however, he completes it on the last paper folio of that quire,

41 Boffey, ‘English Dream Poems’, p. 118. 42 This readership would have been furthered by the presence in England of French printed copies of some of Chartier’s works, including collected Chartier editions entitled ‘Les Fais maistre Alain Chartier’. Versions of this volume, frequently reissued in France, included the Belle dame and parts of the Querelle, and different copies of it were recorded at various times in the English Royal library. See Carley, The Libraries, pp. 26, 36, 72, 203; the earliest mention would seem to refer to the 1494 print by Pierre le Caron for Antoine Vérard. This volume was noted in an anonymous French inventory of Henry VIII’s Library at Richmond made in 1535: see, Carley, The Libraries, p. 26, no. H1; p. 108. Henry VII was a well-known importer of continental printed books, especially those issued by Vérard, and it is likely that he was responsible for the presence of the 1494 le Caron/Vérard print in the Royal library, which is discussed by Winn, Antoine Vérard, p. 14. Robinson, ‘The Manuscript and Print Tradition’ discusses the Querelle in print more generally. 43 Crawford, Household Books, book ii, p. 277. 44 Crawford, Household Books, p. xix.

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meaning that the quire’s final (vellum) folio is blank (apart from the English poem copied in a different hand). The Accusations quire was copied in precisely the same way: the loss of its outer bifolium has caused the loss of the opening stanzas of the text, but its explicit still survives on what would have been the penultimate folio of the quire, leaving its now-lost final folio blank.45 The texts which make up the Royal manuscript have been copied by several different hands, besides the Belle dame and Accusations hand. However, in each case except one, the scribes have been careful to fit the text in question into one complete quire.46 The paper stocks used for the quires are different: quires one and two (the Belle dame and the Accusations) are copied on paper exhibiting a ‘Lettre Y’ watermark,47 quire three (the Débat du cœur et de l’œil) on paper featuring a crown with three fleur-de-lys beneath it, while quires four and five (the Breviaire des nobles) marks a return to the first ‘Lettre Y’ watermark and to the Belle dame/Accusations copying hand. The rest of the manuscript’s watermarks are distributed as follows: quire six (Congié d’amours): two different versions of the arms of France; quire seven (Pris donneur): mixture of running dog and a ‘Lettre P’; quire eight (Serviteur): running dog; quire nine (Traitz et Esbatements): unicorn.48 The correlation of the ‘Lettre Y’ watermarks with a single hand which copied the Belle dame, the Accusations, and the Breviaire might indicate that these three texts were acquired together, at the same time, and other texts were selected and acquired to be arranged around them. These codicological features connect the Royal manuscript particularly closely to recent developments in research into the continental manuscript tradition of the Querelle. McRae has noted that a number of Querelle-manuscripts present the poems out of sequential narrative order, and suggests that this may in some cases be due to their prior ad hoc circulation as ‘booklets’.49 She cites several Querelle-manuscripts — BnF, MS fr. 924, Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliothek, MS NKS 1768 folio, The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliothek, MS 71 E 49 — which display precisely the same kind of vellum ‘covering’ for their paper copies of the Belle dame as the Royal manuscript does.50 McRae concludes of these manuscripts that ‘each poem was copied into its own quire as an integral piece unto itself, as a “booklet”, and the manuscript put together

45 The way in which the Royal manuscript has been restored and rebound over time has resulted in its original quire structure being obscured: I am very grateful to James Freeman for his help in working out the quiring as it would have been before restoration. 46 The exception is the Breviare des nobles, which begins at fol. 42r of the manuscript. This text, which is now incomplete at its close, has been copied over two quires: a quire of eight leaves (quire four in the manuscript) and a quire which is now a single leaf, fol. 50 (quire five). 47 Briquet, Les Filigranes. Laidlaw identifies this watermark as Briquet 9183, dating to 1472–76; Poetical Works, ed. by Laidlaw, p. 131. 48 Identified by Laidlaw as Briquet 10025, dating to 1474–78. 49 McRae, ‘Cyclification’. For a definition of ‘booklet’, see p. 98; for watermarks and booklet-constructed Querelle-manuscripts, see p. 99. 50 ‘The inner and outer leaves of the first item [in BnF fr. 924], the BDSM, are protective parchment leaves which embrace the inner leaves of paper’, McRae, ‘Cyclification’, p. 97. See also p. 99: ‘Further investigation into other Querelle MSS reveals a similar construction. Several other BDSM manuscripts appear to have been produced in the same manner, two of them probably by the same scribe or

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as and when such booklets were acquired’.51 The Royal manuscript forms another example of a Querelle-manuscript structured in a similar fashion: although identified by Boffey as an ‘English’ production,52 the manuscript finds a place within the wider codicological patterns discernible in the dissemination and reception of the Querelle. The contents of the Royal manuscript are all in French, apart from one very interesting short contribution on fol. 16v. The following English lyric (DIMEV 3831), titled by Robbins ‘An Envoy to His Mistress’ in his 1952 edition,53 but without any title in the manuscript, has been copied onto the blank vellum folio in between the close of the Belle dame and the opening of the Accusations: O bewtie pereles and right so womanhod ffor the grete honour and vertue in you I see I you beseche of your moste godeleyhode This litill Boke it myght rehersed be Unto suche fayre þat do excile pite Which causeth their loueres to morne with peinfull hert And not relesse them of their peynes smerte Other ther be with godely countenaunce that perse menes herts right with a sobre yee Their Bewtie is suche with yke þe circumstaunce Whoo can refreyn þei most nedes loued be A lady faire may not exile pite Where bewtie is of right þere is pities place Therfore alwey gode Doo ye pray for grace ffor he is true And will pursue Attendaunce due

in hyr seruice

[Let?] hym not rue his seruice true Do that exchue

-------------ce [manuscript damaged].

This poem has been copied in a hand which is similar to that which copied the Belle dame and the Accusations quires, and it is quite clearly responding to Chartier’s poem; workshop which copied the quires of BnF 924: Copenhagen, KB Ny Kgl Saml. 1768.2o and The Hague, KB 71 E 49. Both of these codices contain an initial booklet of the BDSM reflecting the same construction of outer leaves of parchment’. 51 McRae, ‘Cyclification’, p. 97. 52 Boffey, ‘English Dream Poems’, p. 118. 53 Secular Lyrics, ed. by Robbins, no. 201 (p. 206). Robbins counts the second section, from ‘ffor he is true’, as a separate item (DIMEV 1352). It seems to me, however, that these lines correlate very well with the Lover’s presentation of his own ‘seruice’ and ‘attendaunce’ to the Lady — behaviours which, he asserts, demand the eventual return of his love, and that they therefore fit well as part of the response articulated by the two-stanza poem above them. They are also copied in the same hand as the first two stanzas.

C h art i e r’s B el l e Dam e S an s Merc y and i t s Q u e re lle

in two stanzas, the words ‘bewtie’ and ‘fayre’, synonyms of ‘belle’, are used a total of five times, while the noun ‘pite’ is used three times, two of which occurrences are in the repeated phrase ‘to ex[c]ile pite’, referring to a woman who deliberately chooses be unmerciful to a suitor. The contents of the poem engage quite precisely with the ambiguity at the close of the Belle dame in a similar way to the Querelle. Hult comments that, as the Querelle progresses, ‘là où il s’agissait au début d’une querelle portant sur la culpabilité d’Alain Chartier, le jugement le laisse de côté pour se concentrer sur le personnage de la femme dans la fiction’.54 Early in the Querelle, however, these two areas are also recognized as intertwined: as we have seen, probing Chartier’s narratorial role as slavish ‘escripvain’ versus ‘acteur’, particularly in the final articulation of his own apparent condemnation of the Lady’s behaviour, is recognized as an important part of passing judgement on his female protagonist. The author of this response, too, in the best tradition of Querelle-responses, starting with the Accusations, focuses squarely on judging the Lady’s behaviour rather than judging Alain. Its author leaves a reader in no doubt in its second stanza that the Lady should be considered at fault for having ‘perse[d] menes herts right with a sobre yee’. In the face of the Lady’s careful unpicking of the Lover’s repeated suggestions that his love entitles him to her pity, the poem reasserts explicitly the courtly obligation laid upon a belle dame to be avec, rather than sans mercy in response to a suitor: ‘a lady faire may not exile pite’; ‘Where bewtie is of right þere is pities place’ (my emphasis). The choice made by the Lady — indeed, her right to choose at all — is negated by the language used here: the use of the modal verb and negative (‘may not’) leaves no room for doubt or for individual choice, nor does the suggestion that it is the ‘right’ of a man to expect appropriate compliance from a desired woman. The author of the short poem asks that ‘this litill Boke […] rehersed be | Unto such fayre þat do excile pite’; presumably, by ‘this litill Boke’, he or she is referring to the Belle dame, possibly with the Accusations as well, or possibly alone.55 If the vellum cover around the quire containing the Belle dame were an indication that it initially circulated alone, the lyric, which would then have been written on the back of the booklet, could have been referring in a very literal way to the ‘litil Boke’ upon which it was inscribed. The lyric is listed in DIMEV as appearing only here in the Royal manuscript; it is possible that it was composed especially for inclusion with this particular copy of the Belle dame, as a specific response to it. This brief overview of the evidence provided by the Royal manuscript points to an English readership for the Belle dame which potentially possessed an awareness of the existence of the Querelle, a consciousness of the contentious nature of the Belle dame, and, most importantly, an interest in discussing its implications through poetic response — a readership, in short, not unlike that proposed by the work of 54 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. xxii. 55 Also a potential influence, of course, is Chaucer’s use of the phrase ‘litil book’ to describe Troilus and Criseyde; Roos, as we shall see, makes use of the same expression at the end of the English Belle Dame. Gillespie comments that, as Chaucer uses it here, ‘the word [boke] collapses the distinction between the text and the object that bears it […] the “litel boke” […] encompasses not only its literary content but its existence in a variety of social and material contexts’, Print Culture, p. 35.

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Cayley, McRae, and others when discussing much broader traditions of reception of Chartier’s work. Richard Roos’s Middle English translation of the Belle Dame provided its readers with another such response to the text, obviously of a longer, more complex, and detailed kind to that found in the Royal manuscript. It is to this Middle English translation of the Belle dame that I now wish to turn in order to examine the way in which Roos’s translation demonstrates an awareness of some of the key issues which arose within the Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy, and the way in which Roos consciously situates his work within this widely known tradition of responses to the Belle dame.

Chapter 5

Richard Roos’s Middle English Belle Dame Sans Mercy: A Contribution to the Querelle?

In one of the very few detailed assessments of Richard Roos’s Belle Dame Sans Mercy since the nineteenth century, Ashby Kinch has suggested that his translation of the Belle dame sans mercy is carefully calculated to allow English readers ‘the attraction of joining [a] […] wider literary community’, one characterized by ‘prestige’ linked to a perceived cultural superiority of French; ‘the act of textual translation [is] a means for readers to gain access to a discourse into which they could imaginatively project themselves’.1 By probing further the dynamics of Roos’s translation of the Belle dame in this chapter, we can explore not just his capacity to open up the poem and its central debates to English readers, but also to actively use translation to enter the Querelle on his own account. One of the most overt indications that Roos does so is surely his four-stanza Prologue and mirroring four-stanza Envoy which surround the Belle Dame. These are entirely of his own composition,2 and his choice to compose them forms a structural comment on the way in which Chartier constructed the Belle dame, with a narrator’s voice at the beginning and end of the text, enclosing the central debate between the two fictional protagonists. Roos mimics and extends this structure by adding his own Prologue and Envoy which in turn enclose Chartier’s narrator’s words, so that a Chinese box effect is created. By adding a Prologue and Envoy in a mirror-image of Chartier’s, Roos places himself, as translator of the text, in a parallel position to Chartier’s first-person narrator: both ‘frame’ the narrative material that they transmit with their own voice, and both use that voice to comment on their own position as transcribers, translators, and transmitters of text.3 Indeed, both claim that the poem which ensues is a mere reflection of narrative material over which they have no direct control. Chartier affected to ‘transcribe’ or to replicate the debate between the Lover and the Lady that he allegedly overheard: we recall his protest in the Excusacion that he is ‘que l’escripvain’ (only the scribe), not the inventor of the Belle dame’s words, and the distinction made in the second-cycle Querelle poem La Dame lealle en amour to counter this claim, a distinction which carefully separates



1 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 417. 2 The final four stanzas of the Belle Dame are entitled ‘Lenvoy’ in Warminster, Marquess of Bath, MS Longleat 258’s copy of the text; I use this term to refer to Roos’s four closing stanzas and the term ‘Prologue’ to refer to his four opening stanzas. 3 Compare Dearnley’s comments on the function of prologues to vernacular translations as ‘a way of approaching the translation process itself ’, ‘The Evolution’, pp. 14–15.

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Alain-as-‘recytain […] d’aultry fait’ from Alain-as-‘acteur […] au coupplet derrain’ (vv. 604–08; reciter of the deeds of someone else, author in the final couplet [of the Belle dame]). Roos, like Alain, the narrator of the Excusacion, affects in his Prologue and Envoy to be incapable of doing more than replicating what is in front of him: his ‘rude’ Belle Dame translation will be marked by ‘simplesse’ and ‘unconnyng’, ‘ful deceytute | Of eloquence, of meter and colours’ (l. 17; ll. 843–44). Just as Alain’s claim is clearly somewhat disingenuous, however, so Roos also belies the complexity of the translation he has produced. For example, the fact that Roos’s translation of Chartier’s poem retains its French-language title — a title which, as we have seen, is bestowed censoriously, if ambivalently, upon the Lady by the narrator at the close of the poem, but which appears to have been pretty well universally adopted and known by Chartier’s readers and copyists as the title of the work — can be read as another key method of alerting readers to his translation’s participation in the Querelle. In his added Prologue to the translated Belle Dame, Roos self-consciously advertises his translation as a translation, referring to his own role as the performer of a ‘processe’ on Chartier’s text, and explicitly signalling the moment at which he begins to translate Chartier’s poem to a reader with the words ‘Thus I began’ (l. 28). While Kinch has read this emphasis as a ‘performance of submission to a literary authority’ (i.e. Chartier) on the part of Roos, the emphasis laid on the translation as a ‘processe’ to be ‘perform[ed]’ on Chartier’s poem perhaps suggests otherwise. In this formulation, the Belle dame implicitly becomes the object of Roos’s ‘processe’, the translational process being performed upon it, or with it: My charge was this: to translat by and by […] A boke called La Belle Dame sans Mercy, Whiche maister Alyn made of remembraunce, Cheif secretary with the kyng of Fraunce. And hereupon a while I stode musing, And in myself gretly ymagenyng What wise I shulde perform this said processe […] Thus I began, if it please you to here. Here, Roos names Chartier’s text by its title — ‘a boke called La Belle Dame sans Mercy’ — and emphasizes its origins in ‘Fraunce’, the literary product of a named royal secretary at the court of an opposing political and military power.4 Recent approaches to the Belle dame, particularly those of Cayley and Solterer, have emphasized the poem’s deep embeddedness in its immediate fifteenth-century political contexts. For example, Chartier makes frequent metaphorical use of the (related) vocabulary of warfare and military diplomacy to encode the relationship between the Lover and the Lady, choices which surely could not have failed to resonate with

4 On the fraught and fluctuating fifteenth-century political relationships between France and England, particularly post-Agincourt (1415) see Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 311–16. On references to Agincourt in Chartier’s poem, see Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, pp. 440–41.

R ic h ar d Ro o s’s M i d d l e E n g l i s h Belle Dame Sans Merc y

his contemporary post-Agincourt audience.5 The Lady’s famous punning assertion that ‘je suis france et france veul estre’ (‘I am France/free, and free/France I want to be’, v. 286) in particular has been persuasively read in the context of the allegorical figure ‘Lady France’, victim of outside attack from England and Burgundy, which Chartier employs in his Quadrilogue invectif.6 Roos translates this line unambiguously as ‘Free am I nowe, and fre will I endure’ (l. 314): the ‘free/France’ pun does not work in English. However, elsewhere in his translation he does reflect the potential political valence of the adjective ‘france’ when uttered by the Lady about herself. Translating her claim that ‘force ne peust entamer | La voulanté france et delivre’ (vv. 335–36; force cannot overcome a free and independent will (i.e. hers)), Roos gives the following: ‘strenghe ne force may not atayne, certayne | A will that stont enfeffid in fraunchese’ (ll. 363–64, my emphasis). He chooses the verb ‘enfeffen’, a term with specific legal and political connotations concerning the granting of land, estates, or revenues deriving from them to convey the Lady’s possession of ‘fraunchese’. Furthermore, he pairs this word with the verb ‘atayne’, which can mean specifically ‘to take someone prisoner’, particularly in the context of battle or fighting.7 These lexical choices show an awareness of the way in which Chartier’s Lady’s body and desires are figured at particular points in his poem as ‘French’ land which is under military and political attack from an external force, but which vigorously resists that attack through assertion of legal self-ownership. The fact that Roos is translating this figuration of the Lady’s body into English perhaps makes this moment one of particular pressure: Butterfield describes how, post-Agincourt, ‘English settlers, especially in Normandy, were encouraged to take a long view of their residence in France’,8 so that the settlement of French land by English individuals was a specific feature of this phase of the Hundred Years’ War. Lady France was, crucially, unable, at this point, to assert self-ownership, to claim the freedom to be ‘enfeffid’ in herself, in the same way that Chartier’s Lady does. Roos’s explicit focus in his translator’s Prologue on the political ‘French-ness’ of the Belle dame — ‘a boke […] Whiche maister Alyn made […] Cheif secretary with the kyng of Fraunce’ (ll. 10–12) — I would argue, foregrounds Chartier’s presentation of a Lady who is ‘france’. Roos’s statement about the origins of the Belle dame sets up the poem’s alterity in relation to English — his translation is, he states, an active ‘processe’ (l. 15) to be undertaken with, or enacted upon, ‘maister Alyn’s’ work. All 5 For specifically military and diplomatic terminology, see e.g. Belle dame vv. 225–40; vv. 295–96 and esp. vv. 147–52, where the Lady is described as ‘garison de tous biens | Pour faire a cueurs d’amans frontiere’ (a garrison of all good things, to make a border fortress for a lover’s heart; vv. 147–48). 6 On the politicized Belle dame and ‘F/france’ see Solterer, ‘The Freedoms of Fiction’, and Master and Minerva, p. 181. For a reading of the Lady in the context of the Quadrilogue’s Lady France, see Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, pp. 116–17. 7 On ‘enfeffid’, see MED enfeffen, v. The vast majority of citations of this verb (and closely related terms) in Corpus of Middle English are in a legal context enfeoffing land or property; Roos’s use of it in a metaphorical sense is, apparently, rare. On ‘atayne’, as ‘to take prisoner’, see MED ataken, v., sense 1b. 8 Familiar Enemy, p. 313, see also her description of Henry V’s ‘plans to conquer France through settlement and not only through piecemeal warfare’.

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of which serves to emphasize still more his decision, when translating the closing stanza of Chartier’s text, to retain the label applied to the Lady in exactly the linguistic form in which Chartier cast it: […] hire, that here is named rightwisly, Whiche, by reason, me semeth in this cace, May be called la belle dame sanz mercy. This code-switch at the climactic point in the narrative could be considered from a number of perspectives.9 Here, however, I want to emphasize the way in which Roos cites — and apparently wants his readers to hear — the crucial act of naming in French. Despite the emphasis placed in his translator’s prologue on the fact that he is producing a translation of Chartier’s ‘boke’, when it comes to articulating the Lady’s name at the moment at which it is given to her by Chartier’s narrator, Roos seems to find himself faced with something untranslatable — or, perhaps, something he does not want to translate. In fact, he reverses the sense of alterity he created in the Prologue. His choice to embed the Lady’s ‘French’ name in the final line of translated text, rather than giving her an equivalent English one, inscribes precisely who this Lady is and where she came from onto the translated poem. It is important that we remember that this is a choice Roos makes, not a default setting; the contemporary Catalan translation of the Belle dame, for example, does translate the Lady’s sobriquet into Catalan at the equivalent point.10 Roos’s decision not to do so reminds readers forcibly that Chartier’s act of naming was not, in fact, an end but a beginning, nor was it without consequences. Chartier’s words gave rise to a tradition of responses and interpretative reworkings, of which Roos’s translation cannot stand totally independent. Coldiron, following Venuti’s work on translators’ invisibility within translated works, has recently proposed that ‘visibly foreign elements in translations’ be conceptualized ‘as aesthetic successes of collaborative intertextuality’.11 Describing Roos’s code-switch into French as a ‘visibly foreign element’ (to use Coldiron’s terminology with my own emphasis) would seem like an oversimplification in the wake of recent arguments: French clearly cannot be conceived of as an unproblematically ‘foreign’ language in fifteenth-century England.12 However, a shift in codes is, I would argue, certainly visible — indeed, such a shift is perhaps made possible by

9 Schendl and Wright discuss code-switching as a widespread medieval linguistic practice, ‘CodeSwitching in Early English’. Ad Putter explores it as a literary technique, ‘Code-Switching in Langland, Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet’, as does Hans Jürgen Diller, ‘Code-Switching in Medieval English Drama’. 10 Pagés, ‘La Belle Dame’. 11 Coldiron, ‘Visibility Now’, p. 189. For Venuti’s still-influential suggestion that complete invisibility of the translator ‘has been fetishized among most evaluators and critics’ (‘Visibility Now’, p. 190), see Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. 12 Butterfield Familiar Enemy, pp. 388–89 argues that ‘the bicultural Anglo-French condition did not slide into antique oblivion in the fifteenth century in the way that arguments tracking English and nation often assert’, and Hsy, Trading Tongues, makes a compelling case for the ‘deliberately artistic ends’ of medieval polyglot writers who deploy code-switching in their work, pp. 5–7; pp. 58–65.

R ic h ar d Ro o s’s M i d d l e E n g l i s h Belle Dame Sans Merc y

the long-standing status of French as a co-vernacular (to use Butterfield’s term) in England: Roos can move into a code at once fully comprehensible to his audience, but at the same time, recognizably different to the one he has been using up to this point.13 The ‘collaborative intertextuality’ which the words ‘called la belle dame sanz mercy’ set up between Chartier’s text and Roos’s translation is, I think, powerful, particularly in a translation which, as we have seen, lays so much emphasis on its status as translation at the start of the text. In addition to their importance as introducing the Lady’s name, the words ‘called la belle dame sanz mercy’ perform a second important function in the Belle Dame: they recall exactly Roos’s reference in his Prologue to the translation to the ‘boke called La Belle Dame sans Mercy’ which he is translating. This verbal echo reminds us that, in naming the Lady, Chartier also named or titled the ‘boke’ — indeed, the widespread function of the phrase ‘La Belle dame sans Mercy’ as identifying name for both character and ‘boke’ testifies eloquently to the way in which the Lady’s identity and reputation comes to be constituted and debated through the medium of the book.14 We also recall that the noun ‘book’ — ‘livre’ — can be used in manuscripts of Chartier’s poem to refer not just to that poem, but to its material form in manuscript or booklet, and to the Querelle which travelled with it as well.15 Translating the Belle dame, Roos implies, cannot be divorced from responding to Chartier’s provocative act of naming, and the Querelle to which it gave rise. This Lady has no English name: that she is ‘called la belle dame sans mercy’ is precisely the point. Acts of naming which mirror Chartier’s naming of the Lady at the close of the Belle dame are a feature of several Querelle-texts. As we have seen, the Lady herself is named and renamed in responses to the poem — La Dame lealle en amour, La Cruelle femme en amour — each act of naming also constituting a move in the construction of the Lady’s ‘renom’ or reputation. However, contributors to the Querelle also often insert their own names into their texts. This feature forms part of the competitive-collaborative dynamic within the Querelle, a dynamic which has been outlined by Cayley and Armstrong in particular: poets are both competing with one another — asserting their own poetic skill and challenging others to equal it — and, simultaneously, working in tandem to create accretative, ‘collaborative fictions’.16 Perhaps because of this balance between competition and collaboration, poets’ identities are sometimes 13 We might even compare this moment to Hsy’s definition of ‘translingual writing’ which involves ‘the simultaneous activation of languages at any one moment within any given literary text’, Trading Tongues, p. 56 and also p. 88. Hsy differentiates this from the act of code-switching, which involves alternate, rather than simultaneous activation of languages. 14 In fact, verbal echoes of the translator’s Prologue abound at the end of Roos’s text, contributing to the circularity created by the repeated phrase ‘called la belle dame sanz mercy’ (l. 10; l. 828). In the final stanza of the Envoy, for example, Roos again refers to the translation as ‘this prosses’ (l. 850) and describes its contents as ‘of remembraunce’ (l. 853): both of these expressions replicate exactly expressions he uses in the Prologue, at ll. 15 and 11 respectively. 15 Compare, for example, my discussion of BnF, MS fr. 2230, above, which describes the first cycle of the Querelle as the ‘liure de la belle dame sans mercy’, or the short English poem in the Royal manuscript, inscribed upon the quire which contains the Belle dame, which it refers to as ‘this litil Boke’. 16 Cayley, Debate and Dialogue, p. 5.

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ingeniously ‘hidden’ within their texts. Achille Caulier, for example, who contributed La Cruelle femme en amour and the Ospital d’amour to the Querelle encoded his first name ‘ACILES’ by means of a differently formed acrostic in each poem. In the Cruelle femme, the acrostic is found in the final stanza, formed of the first letter of lines 1–6 of that stanza. In the Ospital, it is decoded by taking the first letter of the first line of the first six stanzas.17 Roos performs a similar manoeuvre to Caulier, in that he too encodes his name within his translation in a piece of wordplay which both conceals and reveals it. Within his translator’s prologue, he describes the way in which he awakes to the task of translating the Belle dame with the phrase ‘yet not forthy I rose’. Thynne 1532 in fact prints this verb ‘I roos’, spelling out a pun which may have been evident to Roos’s fifteenth-century readers.18 Like Caulier, Roos inscribes himself subtly and nonchalantly into the text within a seemingly innocuous statement about the circumstances of the translation’s production.19 The dream-sequence he adds as framing material to the Belle Dame gives Roos the opportunity to encode his own name in the text, but within a verb which simultaneously forms part of the text. Scribes of Roos’s Belle Dame very often display interest in setting out and labelling the different voices they hear in the text, providing a bibliographic reflection of the way Roos structures his framing material and grafts it onto Chartier’s text, and the complex role that this framing material plays in articulating a response to Chartier’s work. French-language speech markers, ‘l’amant’ and ‘la dame’, are provided throughout the Lover and the Lady’s debate in several manuscripts of Roos’s translation, indicating that scribes may well have been aware of the widespread traditions of manuscript layout and transmission of the Belle dame.20 The Fairfax manuscript’s speaker markers provide a particularly detailed engagement with the different voices in the poem (see fig. 1). In addition to using ‘lamant’ and ‘la dame’ throughout the debate, Roos’s translation of Chartier’s concluding stanzas, which end the poem in the voice of his first-person narrator are marked as ‘verba auctoris’, ‘the words of the author’ in the Fairfax manuscript, in a similar fashion to the many Belle Dame manuscripts which label this moment ‘l’acteur’.21 The phrase ‘Explicit la bele dame sanz mercy’ is placed in the middle of the writing column to mark the end of the French text, and Roos’s Envoy, the ‘verba translatoris’, ‘the words of the translator’, are then copied afterwards and labelled. Similarly, Harley 372 uses speaker markers for ‘l’amant’ and ‘la dame’ and signals the shift from the end of the French text to 17 Other Querelle-poets are sometimes identified through rubrics, e.g. the rubric cited by Hult and McRae from BnF fr. 1131 which identifies the ‘Accusation contre la belle dame sans mercy faicte par maistre Baudet’ (= Baudet Herenc), Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. 116 and fr. 1131, fol. 108v. 18 Most manuscripts of Roos’s Belle Dame give ‘rose’; two give ‘arose’. MED risen, v., sense 2 ‘to rise from sleep’ gives ‘roos’ as a common spelling of the past participle ‘rose’, e.g. ‘Reeve’s Tale’, in Riverside ll. 4211–12: ‘And up he roos, and softely he wente | Unto the cradel’. 19 This technique was clearly well known to readers from elsewhere, too: Machaut self-consciously uses anagrams and cryptograms to (supposedly) encode his own name and Toute-Belle’s identity within the Voir dit. These are explored by McGrady, Controlling Readers, pp. 71–73. 20 The Findern manuscript, Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Fairfax 16, BL, MSS Harley 372 and Sloane 1710 all provide these French-language speaker markers in their copies of the Belle Dame. 21 Oxford, Bodl. Lib, MS Fairfax 16, fols 61v–62r.

R ic h ar d Ro o s’s M i d d l e E n g l i s h Belle Dame Sans Merc y

Figure 1. The Belle Dame Sans Mercy, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16, fols 61v–62r, detail. Reproduced with permission.

Roos’s Envoy by labelling the ‘verba auctoris’ and ‘verba translatoris’ at the close of the translation (fol. 69r–v). The Findern manuscript of Roos’s Belle Dame again uses speaker markers throughout to mark the words of ‘lamant’ and ‘la dame’, and inserts the word ‘Explicit’ in the margin to mark the transition from Chartier’s ending to Roos’s Envoy.22 It would appear that accurate placement of speaker markers and layout was important to the scribe who copied the Belle Dame into Findern: on fol. 127r, the scribe has corrected him- or herself after having begun the first word of a new stanza without leaving a space after the preceding one, and having mistakenly marked this stanza ‘la dame’ when it is actually ‘lamant’. The Findern manuscript also marks the opening of Roos’s Belle Dame with the word ‘Prologe’ (at fol. 117v), while Trinity R.3.19 marks the first line translated from Chartier with space for a two-line decorated capital, clearly marking the end of Roos’s Prologue and the beginning of the translated text (fol. 98r). Longleat 258, although it does not use speaker markers, marks off the shift from Chartier’s ending to Roos’s voice at the end of the translation with the word ‘Lenvoy’. The remaining folios of the Belle Dame manuscript now bound within Sloane 1710 also contain the speech markers ‘l’amant’ and ‘la dame’, although unfortunately not enough of this copy remains to ascertain how the scribe handled the opening and the close of the text.23

22 Cambridge, UL, MS Ff.1.6, fols 117r–134v, Explicit at fol. 134r. 23 BL, MS Sloane 1710, fols 164r–176v.

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In Chapter 3, we saw how the Glasgow manuscript of the Romaunt, particularly its rubrication and its decorative scheme, can be conceptualized as a way of articulating the translated text’s relationship to Le Roman de la rose, and situating the Romaunt alongside other reworkings of the Rose. Here, I suggest, we may see a similar dynamic: the scribes or designers of the manuscripts actively articulate a relationship to wider traditions of manuscript transmission, embedding the translation visually and conceptually in pre-existent systems of presenting the text. In the Fairfax manuscript and the Harley manuscript especially, these systems of presentation are extended to take into account the way in which Roos carefully inserts his own voice into the translation, in a mirror image of Chartier’s narrator, particularly at the close of the text. It is especially interesting that the language of the speaker markers changes in Fairfax 16 and Harley 372: the speaker markers used for the overheard characters in the debate — l’amant and la dame — are the habitual vernacular, French-language ones. Those used to mark the poet-narrator and the translators’ voices at the end of the text, however, are given in Latin: verba auctoris, verba translatoris. This repeated formulation — ‘verba x’ — explicitly aligns Roos’s role as translator with Chartier’s as narrator-transcriber (but actually, of course author). Placing these two speaker markers in Latin differentiates the key role in (re) producing the Belle dame which is now shared by Roos and Chartier from that of the poem’s two unnamed protagonists, ‘lamant’ and ‘la dame’. It seems clear from the speaker markers and rubrics in Belle Dame manuscripts that contemporary readers were highly attuned to the ways in which Roos negotiated his status as translator, interested in highlighting the framing device of Prologue and Envoy he chose to use, and interested in considering how his translation fit within contemporary discourses and debates about the Belle dame. These speaker markers respond to cues Roos gives his readers within the framing device that his translation fits into a tradition of Belle dame responses. His Prologue contains clear intertextual references to Chartier’s Excusacion in particular which carefully situate his translation within a developing Querelle tradition. Roos’s use of Chartier’s Excusacion to create his Prologue serves to mark out the English Belle Dame specifically as a response to its source, and to include it in a wide tradition of responses to the Belle Dame, beginning with Chartier’s own ‘excusacion’ (apology) for his notorious text.

The Prologue to the Belle Dame and the Excusacion Kinch, in an important recent article, has examined the Prologue and Envoy which Roos appended to his translation in the context of fifteenth-century English writing.24 He finds Roos’s use of the Prologue and Envoy ‘instrumental in [his] authorial self-fashioning’, a self-fashioning which, he argues, owes much to ‘a new cultural agenda of constructing a distinctively English literary culture’ and to Chaucer’s prior development and deployment of ‘form[s] of English authorial identity’.25 Putter,

24 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’. 25 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, pp. 417, 430.

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too, has recently categorized the Belle Dame as a ‘Chaucerian vision’,26 an appellation which stresses the poem’s connections with Chaucer. It is not my intention here to challenge or undo these connections. As we shall see, intertextual allusion to Chaucer forms an important part of Roos’s creative technique in his translation. As Kinch has also shown, his poetic practice can clearly be situated alongside that of contemporary fifteenth-century English poets.27 However, as Kinch suggests, as well as ‘allud[ing] formally and stylistically to Chaucer’, Roos also alludes to the Querelle as well,28 and the depth and complexity of the Belle Dame’s relationship with traditions of responses to Chartier’s poem has often been overlooked in critical assessments of the translation. In this section, then, I will focus on some examples of areas in which we can read particular aspects of Roos’s poetic practice alongside the Querelle, especially Chartier’s Excusacion. As an initial example of the complex range of allusions which Roos sets in motion when he translates the Belle dame, we can take the verse form which he uses in his Prologue and Envoy, and which most obviously ties his narrator-translator’s voice tellingly to Chaucer’s. As has been well documented, the four stanzas of the Prologue and of the Envoy are both composed in seven-line decasyllabic rhyme royale stanzas rhyming ababbcc: a stanza form that is almost universally described as Chaucerian.29 The text which is actually then translated, however, shifts to Chartier’s ‘huitain’ verse form: eight-line stanzas rhyming ababbcbc.30 This important shift in verse form between Prologue/Envoy and translation has most recently been discussed by Kinch, who finds that Roos employs rhyme royale both to forge a link with Chaucer, ‘its best-known practitioner’, and to indicate more generally ‘the distinctive differences in literary tradition between English and French’ writing, clearly ‘demarcating boundaries’ between translator’s comments and translated text, and ‘foregrounding the distinctive English character of the poem through formal means’.31 In this reading, rhyme royal is associated both with Chaucer and with Englishness, whilst huitains are associated with Chartier and Frenchness, and the shift from one to the other encodes the new, ‘English character of the poem’.

26 Putter, ‘Chaucerian Visions’, p. 143 (my emphasis). 27 See particularly the discussion in Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, pp. 415–18. 28 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 433. Kinch proposes briefly a point of connection between the Belle Dame and Chartier’s Excusacion which I shall amplify here. 29 Compare, for example, Lindenbaum’s recent comments on Hoccleve’s Lepistre, which converts Christine de Pizan’s couplets into rhyme royale stanzas: she terms his choice of this form ‘English and Chaucerian’, ‘Thomas Hoccleve’, p. 37. 30 The careful shift in stanza form from rhyme royale to huitain caused at least one scribe a bit of a headache: the scribe who copied the Belle Dame in the Findern manuscript, having presumably prepared to copy three seven-line stanzas per page throughout the poem suddenly found themselves having to copy three eight-line stanzas, which led to a mistake in the layout of the Belle Dame at the translation of the first stanza of Chartier’s text, see Cambridge, UL, MS Ff.1.6, fol. 117v and Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 432. On the change from rhyme royale to huitain, see also Putter, ‘Chaucerian Visions’, p. 149. 31 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, pp. 431, 440.

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Roos’s use of ‘Chaucerian’ rhyme royale in the Prologue requires further analysis in relation to the narrative content of the Prologue. The Prologue presents the translation of the Belle dame almost as a dream vision in its own right: Roos chooses to set the scene for the ‘processe’ of translation by figuring it as taking place while he is ‘Half in a dreme, nat fully wele awaked’, when ‘The golden slepe […] wrapt [him] undre his whynge’ (ll. 1–2). In this semi-somnolent state, he ‘went [his] way’ (l. 22) to undertake the translation. Chartier, in his Belle dame, gives no hint that the action of the poem comes about as the result of, or in, a dream so that Roos’s addition of this detail acquires an added significance, a significance which is contextualized by Kinch by comparison with Chaucer’s particular use of the dream vision form to engage with rewriting ‘olde bokes’ and ‘appreved stories’ (F-Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, ll. 21, 25).32 Kinch singles out Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend as a peculiarly apt text to compare with Roos’s Prologue to the Belle Dame; the narrator’s ambivalent, semi-dreaming, semi-waking state echoes particularly closely the close of the F-Prologue to the Legend in which it is not made clear whether the narrator actually wakes or not before beginning his composition: ‘And with that word my bokes gan I take | And ryght thus on my Legende gan I make’.33 These textual and thematic echoes chime with the Prologue’s use of rhyme royal to create a translating voice who recognizably deploys references to Chaucer’s works ‘as a means to authorize his […] writing persona’.34 Tellingly, however, at the very moment at which Roos crafts a translator’s voice which appears to be in the image of Chaucer’s, he also reprises very closely the circumstances in which, according to Chartier’s narrator, the Excusacion was composed. The opening scene of the Prologue with its semi-somnolent narrating voice incorporates close echoes of the way in which Chartier’s narrating voice opens the Excusacion: Ce jour me vint en sommeillant, Atendant le solail levant, Moictié dormant, moictié veillant, Environ l’aube ou poy avant, Qu’Amours s’aparut au devant De mon lit a l’arc tout tendu. (ll. 9–14, my emphasis)35

32 Boitani examines Chaucer’s conjunction of reading, dreaming, and creation of new narratives through narration of the dream: ‘Old Books Brought to Life in Dreams’. Compare Lerer’s comments on Lydgate’s Temple of Glass, a text several times transmitted with the Belle Dame: through ‘derivative phrasings’ and echoes of Chaucer, Lydgate ‘transform[s] his narrator from dreamer into reader’, Chaucer and his Readers, pp. 68–69. Through adding a Prologue to the Belle Dame which transforms the translation into the product of a dream vision, Roos also creates a narrator who is manifestly both dreamer and reader. 33 F-Prologue, in Riverside, ll. 578–79. Cf. G-Prologue: ‘And with that word, of slep gan I awake | And ryght thus on my Legende gan I make’, Riverside, ll. 544–45. Butterfield explores the ways in which the ‘play on the borderlines between different kinds of consciousness’ is employed by Gower in the context of confession in the Confessio Amantis, ‘The Confessio Amantis and the French Tradition’, p. 168. 34 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 434. 35 ‘That day I was sleepy, awaiting sunrise, half asleep and half awake, around dawn or a bit earlier, when Amours appeared in front of my bed, with his bow stretched taut’. On similarities with Roos, see also Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 433.

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The link set up here between the Prologue and the Excusacion, furthermore, can be contextualized by closer attention to the shift in verse form between Roos’s Prologue and his Belle Dame-proper. David Hult has noted the enormous ‘succès formel’ of the Belle dame; despite the fact that the verse form it uses was in fact in use in French poetry prior to Chartier, ‘la vogue de cette forme au XVe siècle […] est due au succès de la Belle dame’.36 Most significantly for my purposes, virtually all the texts which contribute to the Querelle mimic Chartier’s huitain stanza form. In the context of the Belle dame, writing in the same verse form is a way of signalling formally the close intertextual connection between Querelle-texts, and of advertising one’s continuation as a continuation: of collaborating in the Querelle’s poetic ‘game’. It is also, as Armstrong has recently shown, one of several possible arenas in which Querelle poets can compete with one another, in terms of displaying the complexity of their poetic skills, which future contributors are then implicitly invited to outdo.37 Roos’s decision to shift from a Prologue in rhyme royale to a huitain stanza form for his translation, then, signals that translation’s very specific relationship to a tradition of responses to the Belle dame, as much as it signals a differentiation of ‘English’ paratextual material from ‘French’ translation. In fact, in the Prologue, it works in concert with the use of a stanza form characteristic of Chaucer and intertextual allusions to a dreaming narrator to create a voice which is keenly aware of the capacity of a translation to craft an interpretative response to the ‘olde bokes’ which form its sources, and a consciousness that this interpretative response to the Belle dame in particular takes part in a broader tradition of poetic replies to Chartier’s poem. Roos’s choice of metre, too, may be usefully contextualized by comparison with the Querelle. As we have seen, Roos shifts his stanza form from rhyme royale to huitain at the start of the translation proper, replicating the stanza form used by Chartier and other Querelle-poets. However, the metre which he uses does not shift in the same way; while Chartier’s huitans are octosyllabic, Roos’s are decasyllabic, a choice which has often been read as a deliberate, and deliberately ‘Chaucerian’ echo of his use of decasyllabic rhyme royale in the Prologue and Envoy.38 Putter characterizes this metre as distinctively English, in opposition to the French-ness of octosyllabic lines — so, ‘Roos […] converts the French octosyllables into English pentameters’.39 However, as Armstrong has discussed, ‘according to contemporary French notions of versification, the decasyllable was more prestigious than the octosyllable’, making it an attractive choice if a writer were attempting to display their superiority and prestige,

36 Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, p. xxi. 37 Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, pp. 22–24. The repeated use of the huitain allows poets to pick up on previous sets of rhyme words which they can rework in new orders and formulations. 38 So, for example, Marta Marfany has recently commented that ‘el traductor ingles mantuvo […] la octava, pero adecuó el octosílabo francés al pentámetro yámbico, instaurado por el gran Geoffrey Chaucer’ (the English translator [i.e. Roos] maintains the huitain, but he turns the French octosyllables into iambic pentameter, instituted by the great Geoffrey Chaucer), ‘Traducciones en verso’, p. 265. 39 Putter, ‘Chaucerian Visions’, p. 149.

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particularly in relation to a text written in a less ‘exalted metre’.40 Decasyllabic lines are in fact used once in the Querelle: the Responce des dames to Chartier’s Excusacion combines decasyllables with the recognizable huitain stanza form exactly as Roos does. As Armstrong explains, the decision to use decasyllables rather than octosyllables ‘reflects the [narrating] ladies’ sense of moral superiority over the squirming Chartier […] by using a more exalted metre than the Excusacion, to which [the Responce] replies’.41 Roos’s use of decasyllabic huitains to translate the Belle dame, therefore, may be read as a method of situating his own text within other responses and rewritings of the Belle dame, as well as an echo of the ‘English’ decasyllabic metre which Chaucer uses in his rhyme royale. Viewed in this light, Roos’s comment in his Envoy that his translation is ‘ful deceytute […] of meter’ (ll. 843–44) gains specific pointedness: it is not lacking in metre, it is precisely the opposite, outdoing Chartier’s octosyllables with decasyllables. The choice of verse form and of metre does not have to be solely about an articulation of ‘Englishness’ or ‘Chaucerian-ness’ versus Frenchness. It can also be a sign of participation in a larger poetic dialogue which spans national identities and borders: a dialogue in which Roos participates, in part by means of engagement with Chaucer. There are several other moments in the Prologue at which Roos’s intertextual engagement with Chaucer can also be contextualized in the light of Chartier’s Excusacion. For example, Roos makes use of a narrative strategy which emphasizes his apparent reluctance to undertake the translation, his sense of inferiority and incapability, and the fact that the translation is a ‘charge’ — a command or compulsion on the part of a superior: My charge was this, to translat by and by (Al thing forgeve), as part of my penaunce, A book called La Belle Dame sans Mercy, Which maister Alyn made of remembraunce, Cheif secretary with the kyng of Fraunce. And hereupon a whyle I stode musing, And in myself gretly ymagening What wise I shulde performe this said processe, Considering by good avisement Myn unconnyng and my gret simplesse. (ll. 8–17) Like Chaucer’s narrator within the Prologue to the Legend, ‘by emphasising his compulsion [to compose the text within his Prologue], [Roos] effectively displaces blame […] while nonetheless focusing attention on the polish of the performance that follows’.42 As we have seen, Roos emphasizes the fact that ‘maister Alyn’ is author of the ‘book’. He, Roos, is merely its translator, marked by his ‘unconnyng and gret simplesse’, his enslavement to his source (a moment which Kinch has 40 Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, pp. 21–22. 41 Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, pp. 21–22. 42 Lerer, Chaucer and his Readers, p. 440.

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labelled ‘an […] assimilation of Chaucer’s experiment in using the discourse of submission as a means to authorise his public writing persona’).43 A similar relationship between authority and mere transmission of that authority is set up by Chartier in the Excusacion: his disingenuous claim to be ‘que l’escripvain’ (only the scribe) of the words that he heard spoken by the Lover and the Lady performs an analogous manoeuvre to absolve him from all blame for the content of the Belle dame. Roos’s Prologue to the Belle Dame emphasizes repeatedly that the translation is undertaken because of a ‘strait commaundement’ from ‘hem to whom I durst not dissobeye’ (ll. 18, 7): the similarities with the God of Love’s commandment to compose the Legend as recompense for offence caused by previous works are evident. However, once again, this feature links Roos’s translation perhaps still more explicitly to Chartier’s Excusacion: the Excusacion, too, features a hapless narrating figure forced by an angry superior to make some kind of amends: Si veul chastier tes mesfaiz Ou que tu m’en gaiges l’amende. (vv. 111–12) (I want to punish your misdeeds if you don’t engage to make recompense.) Like Chartier’s Excusacion for the Belle dame, Roos’s translation of it takes place as a result of compulsion. The response of the Excusacion’s narrator, furthermore, refers explicitly to the ensuing words he will utter — which will, of course, form the second half of the Excusacion itself — conceptualizing them as comprising the recompense that the God of Love desires: Quant je euz ces paroles ouÿ […] Si dis: ‘Pour Dieu misericorde, Escoutez moi excuser, sire.’ Il respondy: ‘Je le t’acorde. Or dy ce que tu vouldras dire.’ (vv. 113–20) (When I had heard these words, then I said ‘In the name of God, have mercy on me. Listen to me apologize, my lord.’ He replied: ‘I grant you this. Now say what you want to say.’) Both the Excusacion and Roos’s Belle Dame comprise textual production — indeed, literary production — as a means to placate a more powerful individual. Manuscripts of Chartier’s Excusacion very often show a sophisticated awareness of the literary constructedness, the sheer textuality, of Chartier’s narrator’s supposedly spontaneous, verbal self-exculpation at this point, and a sensitivity to the way in which the Excusacion has been carefully planned and crafted by Chartier to function as a bi-vocal poem, balancing two very different readings of the Belle dame — the God of Love’s and the narrator’s — even as it claims to close down those divergent readings. Many manuscripts of the Excusacion place unusual amounts of decoration or 43 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 430.

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rubrication at this ‘hinge’ point in the middle of text where the speaking voices shift from the God of Love’s irate accusations to the narrator’s grovelling self-justification.44 BnF, MS fr. 24440, for example, places the following rubric before v. 113: ‘comme le dieu damours tient larc enteze et la fleche en la corde oyant lexcusacion de maistre alain’ (fol. 119r; how the God of Love holds the bow taut and the arrow on the cord listening to the excusacion of Maistre Alain). BnF, MS fr. 1642 inserts the following underlined rubric at the same place: ‘Response faicte par maistre Alain chartier Au dieu damours en soy excusant de ce quil laccusoit avoir escript et fait livres nouveaux contre ses droiz’ (fol. 237v; response made by Maistre Alain chartier to the God of Love excusing himself, as he accused him of having written and made new books against his laws). Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 554 notes, again in the same place, that ‘Cy sensuit la Reponce que Maistre alain fist au dieu damours’, before beginning the second half of the Excusacion with a red capital letter, a distinction usually reserved for marking the beginning of new texts in this manuscript (fol. 73v; here follows the response that Maistre Alain made to the God of Love). These manuscripts evidently recognize that Chartier’s text is a carefully constructed response to his own Belle dame, a response which dramatizes conflicting interpretations of the poem and which specifically identifies further literary engagement and production as a way of exploring the potential of those interpretations. Roos’s translation is presented, in its Prologue, as precisely this kind of work, carefully crafted and generated from engagement with a pre-existent text, the Belle dame, ‘which maister Alyn made of remembraunce’ (l. 11, see also l. 853). This line has proved something of a challenge for readers to unpick: Symons reads ‘made of remembraunce’ as all one phrase; suggesting that it signifies ‘recorded’, which would give a gloss ‘which maister Alyn recorded’ for the whole line.45 Putter disagrees, reading ‘of remembraunce’ as a deferential reference to ‘maister Alyn’ himself, glossing the line as: ‘which maister Alyn, [who is] worthy of remembrance, made’.46 In choosing this somewhat ambiguous phrasing, Roos draws on several aspects of the Belle dame’s narrative and thematic structure. The idea of making a book ‘from remembrance’ or from memory hooks into the way in which Chartier carefully builds a temporal element into the narrative layering at the start of his poem. The opening lines of the Belle dame situate its events as something the narrator experienced in the past, which he is now recalling: N’a gueres, chevauchant, pensoye, Comme homme triste et douloureux, Au deul ou il fault que je soye Le plus dolent des amoureux. (vv. 1–4)

44 The Excusacion is divided into two fifteen-stanza sections of huitain stanzas: its first half comprises the narrator’s introduction and the God of Love’s accusations, its second, the narrator’s response to these accusations. The stanza I cite above in which the narrator begins to defend himself is number 15: the midpoint of the text. 45 Chaucerian Dream Visions, ed. by Symons, note to l. 11. 46 Putter, ‘Chaucerian Visions’, p. 149.

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(A little while ago, while I was riding, I was thinking, like a man both miserable and in pain, of the state of grief that I had to be in, the most miserable of lovers.) This temporal positioning of course problematizes the narrator’s role of ‘escripvain’ recording and transmitting overheard words: the fidelity and clarity with which he transmits the happenings of the poem, and its central debate, must be complicated by his distance from it in time. Roos’s use of the term ‘remembraunce’ may have a further resonance to do with translation, too: within the Prologue to the Legend, Chaucer employs it to designate the kind of literary authority available for new readers to access in ‘olde bokes’: if we did not have them, he says, ‘yloren were of remembraunce the keye’ (F-Prologue, l. 26). Chartier’s book is, Roos states, ‘made of remembraunce’ (l. 11, see also l. 853), and, read alongside Chaucer’s use of the word in the Prologue to the Legend, this phrase suggests that the Belle dame is both constructed out of ‘remembraunce’ or literary authority, and simultaneously about that authority. Within the Excusacion, on several occasions, specifically religious vocabulary is employed by Chartier to describe his narrator’s predicament: Amours states that ‘tu mourras de ce pechié quite’ (v. 41; you will die absolved of this sin), and the narrator invokes ‘Dieu misericorde’ (v. 117; divine mercy) in the face of Amours’s threats to ‘chastier [his] mezfaiz’ (v. 111; punish his misdeeds) and excommunicate him ‘comme herite’ (v. 43; as a heretic). A priest with the power to grant Alain absolution or deliver a sentence of excommunication for heresy is one of several discursive roles which Amours seems, through his language, to play in the Excusacion; Chartier experiments with differently expressed dynamics of power and submission between the two characters.47 Amours demands an apology and recompense (supposedly, as we have seen, supplied by Alain in the form of the Excusacion) to excuse the composition of the Belle dame, the narrator’s ‘mezfaiz’: not recanting, and not producing an adequate apology for his sin will result in excommunication. The relationship that Amours constructs — not to mention the loaded terms used to describe it — is penitential: Alain has committed a ‘pechié’ (sin), he must demonstrate contrition, confess, and perform satisfaction before being granted pardon, or being ‘quite’.48 Indeed, his sin appears to be of the utmost gravity: he is risking an accusation of heresy if he does

47 Armstrong comments on the presentation of Amours as a feudal lord and ‘Alain’ as his transgressing vassal, Virtuoso Circle, p. 14. The God of Love seems to have been a highly labile character for readers of the Excusacion: the Clumber Park manuscript preserves a wonderfully arresting miniature at fol. 100v of Amours confronting the narrator in which s/he is clearly a female rather than a male figure, and is thus implicitly aligned with the women to whom Chartier dedicates the text, perhaps even with the belle dame herself. 48 For the three components to penance, see e.g. ‘Tract on Hearing Confessions’, trans. by Shinners, p. 19: ‘penance consists of three things — contrition of the heart, confession by words and satisfaction through works’.

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not quickly take his words back.49 This dynamic is reflected in Roos’s use of the very specific term ‘penaunce’ to describe his own translation: My charge was this, to translat by and by (Alle thing forgeve) as part of my penaunce A boke called La Belle Dame sans Mercy, Which maister Alyn made of remembraunce. (ll. 8–11, my emphasis) Like the narrator of the Excusacion, Roos figures his own textual production as (one part of a) penitential act, undertaken at the express behest of a superior. Indeed, in both cases, we might say that a similar undertaking in relation to the Belle dame is at play: while Chartier obviously is not ‘translating’ his earlier poem in a literal or linguistic sense in the Excusacion, he is being told by the God of Love to rewrite its ‘faulx vers’ (v. 106; false verses), to take back its words and change them, or reissue them as something else: ‘se briefment ne t’en desdiz’ (v. 42; if you don’t recant or take your words back). Both Roos’s Belle Dame and Chartier’s Excusacion, therefore, comprise a reworking of a prior text, the Belle dame. What does it mean to compare the process of rewriting the Belle dame in English to ‘penaunce’? Roos’s use of the term ‘penaunce’ to refer to his translation may be contextualized by a comparison with a similar comparison made by Chaucer, who, like Roos, also makes this conceptual link in a framing device which he adds to a translated text. The envoy which Chaucer composes for the close of his Complaint of Venus also contains a ‘remembraunce/penaunce’ rhyme in the context of a translation from French into English: For elde, that in my spirit dulleth me Hath of endyting al the subtilte Wel nygh bereft out of my remembraunce, And eke to me it ys a gret penaunce, Syth rym in Englissh hath such skarsete, To folowe word by word the curiosite Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. (ll. 76–82) Chaucer here links his act of penance specifically to the concept of ‘word for word’ translation: following his source text exactly. Indeed, penance is perhaps a particularly fruitful metaphor for the kind of translation which Chaucer suggests he has undertaken here. Penance consists (at least in part) of repetition of predetermined textual formulae in the form of set prayers, repetition whose frequency is determined by a priest — a spiritual superior — in response to an individual’s confession.50 The use of penance as an image to describe translation at least superficially stresses the replicatory and

49 This moment in the Excusacion can, of course, be fruitfully read alongside the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women: here, too, a hapless narrator is accused of heresy by the God of Love, and here too, recanting involves (re)writing. 50 See, for example, ‘Tract on Hearing Confessions’, trans. by Shinners, esp. p. 23: ‘satisfaction chiefly has three elements: fasting, prayer and almsgiving […] Prayer should be directed for spiritual sins’.

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repetitive potential in translation, the way in which it is circumscribed by similarity to a pre-existent paradigm. However, Chaucer’s claim that age, infirmity, and the inherent superiority of French rhymes to ‘Englissh’ ones combine to make his translation an inferior piece of writing which effectively replicates another text is obviously questionable. His active role in adapting and altering the material found in the sequence of five ballades by Oton de Graunson51 which he uses to form the Complaint has long been recognized, as has the particular virtuosity with which he constructs the versification of the Envoy.52 The term ‘penaunce’, while ostensibly referring to an act of tedious, ‘word by word’ translation, actually, here, refers to quite the opposite: to a composition that has been imaginatively reconceptualized through translation into English. Is Roos deliberately citing Chaucer’s reference to translation from French in his use of the ‘penaunce’ trope, rhyming the word, as he does, with ‘remembraunce’? If so, what is he hinting about his own translation of the Belle dame? Certainly, that a translation which alters its source text can ironically call attention to its remodelling of that source by modestly claiming to be only a ‘rude translacion […] ful deceytute | Of eloquence’ (ll. 842–44). However, perhaps, he also insinuates something more particular. Butterfield examines the Complaint of Venus in the context of ‘ballade exchange’ between Chaucer and Graunson, itself one part of much wider ‘international cross channel exchanges’ between ‘a community of linked writers’.53 Roos’s echo of the ‘penaunce/ remembraunce’ rhyme also signals his own adherence to a textual ‘community’: like Chaucer’s engagement with Graunson, his translation of the Belle dame hooks into a ‘collective and collusive generative impulse’ to rework, respond, and reply.54

The Belle Dame as ‘Chaucerian’ Poem: Using Chaucer Intertextually As my discussion thus far has suggested, considering Roos as a ‘Chaucerian’ poet needs to involve more than simply considering him as imitative of Chaucer, or writing in Chaucer’s ‘mould’. Roos’s ‘borrowing’ of what have come to be conceptualized as characteristic features of Chaucer’s writing (particularly of his dream visions) and his use of rhyme royale verse form need to be placed in the wider context of Roos’s awareness

51 Graunson’s sequence survives in Paris, BnF fr. 2201 and Philadelphia, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., MS Codex 902, each time in the same order. Fr. 2201 titles the ballades ‘les cinq balades ensievans’, while Penn. 902 preserves them with no title. Chaucer uses material from all five (in varying degrees) to form Venus, discussed by Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 252–53 and Idea of the Vernacular, ed. by Wogan-Browne and others, Part I: Authorising Text and Writer, Extract 1.3 (pp. 26–27). 52 Phillips, ‘Chaucer’s French Translations’ and ‘The Complaint of Venus’. The form of the envoy is discussed by Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 253–54: ‘Chaucer, by using only two rhyme sounds in the whole stanza, performs a much more difficult (and characteristically French) feat than either he or Graunson attempts in the ballades themselves’. 53 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 234–41 and pp. 252–54. 54 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 264.

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of, and participation in the Querelle. In the following section, then, I want to consider in detail several more moments in which Roos consciously sets up intertextual links with Chaucer’s work, particularly with the Legend of Good Women and with Troilus and Criseyde. In each case, however, I want to argue that his use of Chaucer at these moments can be read as a way of commenting on the Belle dame: rather than simply imitating Chaucer, Roos constructs a dialogue with Chaucer’s work, in which each text informs the other. Chaucer’s status as translator-author, and his examination of this status within much of his work, was considered by Roos as relevant to his contribution to the Querelle. Given that it is often through the presentation of female figures — Criseyde, the women of the Legend — that Chaucer explores such questions, connections with Chartier’s Belle dame are extremely apposite. As Dinshaw has observed, there is within Chaucer’s work ‘a double perspective associated with the feminine that describes larger Chaucerian poetic concerns’. This double perspective is, she argues, located at ‘the intersection of hermeneutics with the question of the feminine’,55 and it is at precisely this intersection that the Belle Dame, the Querelle, and Chaucer meet. Roos’s Envoy

The first moment that I want to consider again forms part of Roos’s framing device for the Belle Dame: Goo litel boke! God send thee good passage; Chese well thy way, be simple of manere, Loke thy clothing be like thy pilgrymage, And, specially, lete this be thy praiere Unto heim al that thee wil rede or here, Wher thou art wronge, after thaire help to calle, Thee to corecte in any part or alle. (ll. 830–06) These words form the first stanza of the Belle Dame’s Envoy, in which Roos addresses his ‘litel boke’ in a formulation which very obviously echoes that used by Chaucer at the end of Troilus and Criseyde.56 Indeed, his use of what Butterfield terms ‘the Troilus rhyme royale stanza’ to structure the Envoy shapes perhaps the most obvious intertextual connection in the whole translation here: the reference to Troilus is unmistakeable.57 The injunction to ‘corecte’ the book, too, finds a parallel in the narrator’s comments at the close of Troilus: ‘O moral Gower, this book I directe | To the and to the, philosophical Strode, | To vouchen sauf, ther nede is, to correcte, | Of your benignites and zeles goode’ (v, ll. 1856–59). The ‘ostentatiously Chaucerian’58 55 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, pp. 154, 133. 56 Compare Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 441. 57 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, p. 305. 58 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 441. The ‘go litel book’ topos was widely used post-Chaucer, see for example Caxton’s epilogue to his 1478 print of the English translation of Christine de Pizan’s ‘morall prouerbes’: ‘Go thou litil quayer’. Coldiron discusses Caxton’s use of the apostrophe to the quire, ‘Taking Advice from a Frenchwoman’, pp. 136–41. Lerer discusses the ‘obsessive rewriting of Chaucer’s envoy’ in the fifteenth century, Chaucer and his Readers, pp. 39–40.

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reference to a ‘litel boke’ occurs in Troilus at a point in the text at which Chaucer explicitly confronts the status of the vernacular author-translator in relation to his poetic forbears, and the status of a translated text within a historical canon: Go, litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n’envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace. (v, ll. 1786–92)59 Citing this moment at the close of the Belle Dame perhaps represents more than ‘a bid for canonicity’ through feigned humility, in an echo of Chaucer’s similar gesture.60 Although Roos certainly does advertise his text by protesting its feebleness and its simplicity, his evocation of Troilus and Criseyde at this moment does something else as well. Chaucer articulates a literary lineage into which he inserts his own poem: by enumerating its forebears, he situates his text as one of a group which collectively constitute the narrative of Troy. However — as Chaucer reminds us in the House of Fame — those ‘besy for to bere up Troye’ (iii, ll. 1472–80) do not always agree with one another. The story of Troy, in other words, is constructed through conflict between competing versions of events (including, of course, Chaucer’s own). Roos’s creation of an intertextual link between this moment in Troilus and Criseyde and his translation of the Belle Dame, then, also serves to articulate the way in which Roos’s translation forms part of a group or line of texts, which compete and collaborate in constructing the narrative of the Lady herself. Like Troy, the Lady is the subject of repeated rewriting. ‘Trouthe’ in Love and Translation

In the penultimate line of his Envoy, Roos echoes a key term in both Troilus and the Legend by bringing in the concept of ‘trouth’ in love. This reference reinforces the links made by Roos in his Belle Dame Prologue with the Prologue to the Legend, and occurs at the very moment at which Roos appears to join the Querelle most unambiguously. As Kinch has noted, at the close of his Envoy Roos appears to be ‘unable to resist the temptation’ to deliver an opinion on the behaviour of the Lady,61 and he apparently comes down resoundingly on the side of the Lover: Noo trewe man [should] be vexed, causeles, As this man was, whiche is of remembraunce; 59 Lerer discusses the ways in which the envoy as a genre ‘seeks to establish the relations between an author’s intention and a reader’s response that can define the social function of the writer and the cultural and interpretive responsibilities of the audience’, Chaucer and his Readers, p. 209, compare also Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, pp. 187–200. 60 Compare Kinch’s comments that Roos’s comments ‘reflect a partial assimilation of Chaucer’s authorial strategy’, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 441. 61 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 444.

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And alle that doon thaire faitheful observaunce, And in thaire trouth purpose heim to endure, I pray God send heim better aventure.62 (ll. 853–58) As we have seen, Chartier himself seems deliberately to dodge the issue of the dame’s guilt at the close of the French poem, sliding out of giving a definitive pronouncement one way or the other; one reason why the debate concerning the poem was able to rage so freely. Kinch suggests that in the final stanza of his Envoy, quoted above, Roos ‘pre-emptively narrow[s] the interpretation of Chartier’s text, with its notoriously ambivalent double moral’,63 for his final summary does appear to be in favour of the Lover. However, it may be that Roos is in fact recreating this ambivalence in his Epilogue, through intertextual references to Troilus and the Legend, in particular using the term ‘trouthe’. Within the Legend ‘trouthe’ is an unstable concept. The word is repeated in virtually every Legend in order to designate superficially the moral superiority of the particular woman it refers to, and to express the contrast between her behaviour and that of the (dastardly) man who betrays and dupes her. It would seem that ‘trewe’ and ‘untrewe’ are set up as simple opposites, one used for women’s behaviour in love, the other for men’s. However, its use in this fashion is deliberately complicated by Chaucer by the fact that the narrator is himself, of course, male. As this is the case, can we trust anything he says at all, including the Legend itself? After all, many of the male protagonists within the Legend are adept at producing ‘feyned trouthe’ and ‘feyned wo’,64 using language in order to deceive and beguile. At the close of the ‘Legend of Phyllis’, Chaucer has his narrator explicitly draw attention to the literary ‘trouthe’ (or otherwise) of his Legend, stating: Be war, ye wemen, of youre subtyl fo, Syn yit this day men may ensaumple se; And trusteth, as in love, no man but me. (ll. 2559–61) This declaration of infallibility, however, is just as explicitly undermined at the close of the Legends of ‘Lucrece’ and of ‘Philomela’, on both occasions with a pointed use of the word ‘trewe’: And as of men, loke ye which tirannye They doon alday; assay hem whoso lyste The trewest ys ful brotel for to triste. (ll. 1883–85) Ye may be war of men, if that yow liste […] Ful lytel while shal ye trewe hym have That wol I sayn, al were he now my brother. (ll. 2387–92)

62 Again, the use of the term ‘remembraunce’ is notable; here it is the Lover’s vexation which is ‘of remembraunce’. Roos brackets his translation with uses of this word; as I have noted, it appears in his Prologue as well. 63 Kinch, ‘Naked Roos’, p. 444. 64 Legend of Good Women, in Riverside: ‘Legend of Hypsiple’, l. 1374; ‘Legend of Dido’, l. 1257.

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The repeated injunctions to women (and readers) to ‘be war of men’, and more explicitly of the ‘trouthe’ of what they say, clearly have an impact on the ways in which we read the narrator of the Legend; he is self-confessedly just as shifty as his male characters, and the ‘trouthe’ of his text likely to be just as unreliable. Indeed, it quickly becomes clear to a reader that the texts which make up the Legend, adapted from classical works (in particular Ovid’s Heroides), often deviate quite significantly from their source material, and this fact, too, is highlighted by Chaucer through his narrator. The Legend of Dido, for example, famously opens with a laudatory address to Virgil: Glorye and honour, Virgil Mantoan, Be to thy name! and I shal, as I can, Folwe thy lanterne, as thow gost byforn, How Eneas to Dido was forsworn. In thyn Eneyde and Naso wol I take The tenor, and the grete effectes make. (ll. 924–29) However, the following Legend owes a far greater debt to Ovid’s presentation of Dido in the Heroides than to the Aeneid. Amanda Holton has recently analysed Chaucer’s precise stylistic borrowings from each author in the Legend of Dido, finding that Chaucer ‘conceived of each of his source texts as having a different function, even when there might be areas of overlap’.65 That Chaucer prefers to use Ovid’s complaint in the Heroides to construct his Dido’s voice rather than Virgil’s in the Aeneid is especially significant. As Holton comments, Chaucer manipulate[s] the stories he takes from his source texts and thus constructs an independent take on them. […] In the way he uses complaint as a way of remaking source narratives, he follows Ovid’s own practice. […] Chaucer is borrowing the technique Ovid chose to manipulate and reconstruct stories he himself inherited.66 While ostensibly using Virgil as his primary source, and praising the ‘lanterne’ of his text, which lights the way for vernacular translator-adaptors such as himself, Chaucer slyly slips in a throwaway reference to ‘Naso’, whose work and authorial techniques he actually draws on.67 Cooper has highlighted the way that Chaucer consciously ‘plays off Ovid against Virgil’68 at this point in the Legend; his purpose must be to illustrate the way that a translator can re-author and change a text. As Sheila Delany writes, ‘the narrator [of the Legend] is a writing man who warns us in

65 Holton, Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics, p. 67. The ‘area of overlap’ to which Holton refers is Dido’s complaint to her sister as given in the Aeneid; this complaint is not picked up by Chaucer for use in the Legend of Dido, as he prefers to turn to his ‘complaint source’, the Heroides. 66 Holton, Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics, pp. 67–68. 67 Holton identifies this lantern image as a reference to Dante as well as to Virgil and Ovid, Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics, p. 86. She also identifies different areas of Ovidian authorial technique which Chaucer draws on; cf. her comments on rhetorical expression of emotion, Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics, pp. 147–48. 68 Cooper, ‘Chaucer and Ovid’, p. 72.

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his writings, both explicitly and by exemplum, about the chances we take in trusting too completely the utterances of men’.69 Such an attitude bears comparison with that of the narrator of Troilus. The repeated references made in Troilus to ‘myn auctor’ which highlight the status of the text as faithful translation whilst it is in the very act of deviating from source material are well documented.70 In this text too, the ‘trouthe’ of the two lovers (or rather, Criseyde’s lack of it) is bound up with the ‘trouthe’ of the text, the issue of faithful translation and representation of the main characters. Criseyde’s status as character in a pre-existing literary tradition, a ‘storie’ (v, l. 1037), means that she cannot do other than what she does: to be ‘trew’ to the text she must be ‘untrewe’ to Troilus. Her realization of this comes in a passage added by Chaucer to his source material, and highlighted by a cluster of references to the fictionality of his characters, to their dependence on what ‘trewely, the storie telleth us’ (v, l. 1051): Allas, of me unto the worldes ende, Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge! (v, ll. 1058–61) Criseyde’s metatextual sensitivity to literary tradition and authority — both that which created her and that which Chaucer’s re-creation of her would give rise to — and to her status as character within it, draws attention to his examination of the concept of literary ‘trouthe’ and fidelity in the translation and transmission of texts. The reference made to ‘trouthe’ in the Envoy to Roos’s Belle Dame sets up an intertextual echo of an important theme and expression used repeatedly by Chaucer. It can be read as ambivalence towards the motives and ‘trouthe’ of the ostensibly ‘trew man’, and thus as ambivalence towards the culpability of the Lady. It can also, however, be read as related ambivalence towards the role of the translator. Translating the final stanzas of Chartier’s Belle dame, situated directly before his own Envoy within the text, Roos pointedly adds to the French text two uses of the word ‘trew’ within four lines: Ye trew lovers, thus I beseche you alle Such aventours, flee heim in every wise, And as people defamed ye heim call; For they, trewly, do you gret prejudise. (ll. 815–18, my emphasis) This quotation translates Chartier’s lines: Si vous pry, amoureux, fuyés Ces vanteurs et ces mesdisans Et comme infames les huyés Car ilz sont a voz fais nuysans (ll. 785–88, my emphasis), 69 Delany, Naked Text, p. 207. Compare also Dido’s speech in the House of Fame, book i: ‘O, have ye men such godlyhede | In speche, and never a del of trouthe?’, ll. 330–31, my emphasis. 70 Windeatt, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, chap. 2, esp. pp. 54–70.

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where it is all lovers, ‘amoureux’, rather than specifically ‘trew lovers’ who are addressed as among the readers of the poem. These ‘trew lovers’ are differentiated by Roos from ‘avantours’ who are ‘defamed’, and it is important to pay specific attention to the strategies of translation employed here. Roos’s terms ‘avantours’ and ‘defamed’ are respectively derived from very similar, although not identical, words in the French text: ‘vanteurs’ and ‘infames’. Roos has chosen vocabulary which presents obvious etymological connections to the French words used by Chartier, but which also contains particular inferences and connotations in an English context as well. Close examination of such connotations demonstrates that, far from simply producing a ‘word for word’ translation with the closest approximate English word inserted in place of the French, Roos appears to have selected his vocabulary extremely carefully. ‘Infames’ is translated using a word that is extremely close phonetically to Chartier’s French: ‘defamed’, meaning badly reputed, from the verb ‘defamen’.71 Both words share the morpheme ‘fame’ (as in ‘reputation’) in both languages; ‘imfame’ in French can thus mean ‘badly reputed’ in a general sense. In the context of the Querelle, however, both ‘imfame’ and the verb ‘difamer’, which is the French etymological root of English ‘defamen’, become crucial and extremely specific terms. The adjective ‘infame’ recurs very frequently throughout the Querelle, often as a rhyme word at the end of a line. The Cruelle femme, for example, at stanza CXIII rhymes ‘femme / dame / imfame / nomme et clame’ (woman / lady / infamous / name and declaim) and immediately afterwards at stanza CXIX ‘femme / imfame’ (woman / infamous). These collocations are extremely interesting, as the second syllable of ‘imfame’, although written differently, is pronounced identically to ‘femme’ in French. ‘Imfame’ or infamous, as well as tapping into the concerns about ‘fame’, name, and reputation which abound within the Querelle, also takes on connotations of ‘un-womanliness’: ‘im-fame’.72 In her cruelty, it can be implied, the Lady is no longer a woman, for she refuses to act in the way prescribed for women. Alternatively, Chartier can slyly describe ‘vanteurs et mesdisans’ as ‘infame’, and, within the Excusacion, can even apply this adjective to his own ‘liure’,73 subtly drawing attention to his own ambiguous motives and attitude to his creation. Roos deliberately retains a word that is very close to Chartier’s French, and involves a similar ‘fame / femme’ pun in order to forge a link to the Querelle in his text. The secondary English meaning of ‘fame’ as rumour or hearsay may also come into play here. It is, of course, the Lady herself, rather than any ‘vanteurs et mesdisans’, who repeatedly loses her good reputation in exchange for a bad one during the Querelle. And this reputation is, indeed, lost through ‘fame’, or insubstantial rumour: the conversation between the Lover and the Lady which forms the main part of the poem is figured by Chartier as something he overheard. 71 Cf. MED defamen, from OF difamer, defamer & L diffamare : 1. To damage the reputation of (sb.), disgrace, dishonor; bring discredit or dishonor to (sb.). 72 Solterer makes a similar point about the pairing ‘feme [= femme] / diffame’ (woman / defame); for her, it evokes ‘the problem of damaging women’s names, indeed one might say of “de-naturing” them (di-ffame)’, The Master and Minerva, pp. 131, 176. Cf. the Responce des dames, which rhymes ‘dames / diffames / infames / femmes’ (ladies / defame / infamous / women) at stanza II. 73 Excusacion, in Le Cycle, ed. by Hult and McRae, vv. 84–85.

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The Lady is consistently denied a voice throughout the Querelle, as others purport to ‘read’ her intentions from the overheard words that Chartier records, and make claims for and against her. Through retaining a word so similar to Chartier’s French term, whose root is also featured extensively in the Querelle in a similar way, Roos implicates his translation quite specifically within a tradition of responses to Chartier’s work. ‘My verray lode-sterre’: The Belle Dame and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde is a text whose major themes resonate strongly in places with those of the Belle Dame: again, the questions of female literary reputation, female agency within a love affair, and female responsibility for the death of a lover, are paramount. We have already seen how Roos makes explicit use of the text in his Envoy, and how Chaucer’s treatment of Criseyde’s ‘trouthe’ might inform his translation. A second connection made by Roos to Troilus and Criseyde comes, significantly, at the opening of the debate proper between the Lover and the Lady, in the form of a verbal echo of Chaucer’s poem. Firstly, Roos again introduces the concept of ‘trouth’, placing it in the mouth of the Lover, where there is no precedent in the French text for the addition: ‘[e]n ma loiauté observant’ (v. 214; observant in my loyalty) is translated as ‘[b]oth faith and trouth I give your womanhede’ (l. 241). The addition of the concept of ‘trouth’ at this point leads into further echoes of Troilus. Chartier’s stanza XXIX, spoken by the Lover, reads as follows: Nully n’y pourroit la paix mettre [into the Lover’s heart] Fors vous qui la guerre y meïstes Quant vos yeulx escriprent la lettre Par quoy deffïer me feïstes, Et que Doulx Regart transmeïstes, Herault de celle deffiance Par le quel vous me promeïstes, En defiant, bonne fiance. (vv. 225–32) (Nobody could put peace into it, except you, who put war there, when your eyes wrote the letter by which you defied me, and which Sweet Looks transmitted, the herald of this defiance, by whom you promised me, through defying, good faith.) Translating the line ‘Fors vous qui la guerre y meïstes’ with ‘ye | Whiche are the grounde and cause of al this warre’, Roos finds a rhyme for ‘warre’ in the term ‘lode-sterre’: ‘Your pleasaunt loke, my verray lodesterre’ (ll. 254, 257). The content of Chartier’s rhyming phrase, ‘Et que Doulx Regart transmeïstes’, is rendered in the words ‘Your pleasaunt look’, but the second half of the line is Roos’s invention, and he has chosen to insert a term used twice by Chaucer within Troilus, each time also rhymed with the word ‘werre’.74 The compound ‘lode-sterre’ is rare when used 74 Troilus, in Riverside, v, ll. 232–34, 1392–93.

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in an amatory context to refer to a desired woman. It is more frequently employed literally, in the context of astronomy and navigation, or figuratively, in relation to an admired or pre-eminent individual — usually a knight or a king — or to denote a spiritually guiding force.75 Where this admired or guiding individual is female, she is most usually the Virgin Mary, or a saint.76 Of the twenty-six example quotations supplied by the MED, only one (aside from Roos’s own usage) employs ‘lode-sterre’ in relation to a desired female love-object. This is Ballade 55 in the English-language version of Charles d’Orléans’s verse: For Fortune nys so crewell of manere To robbe this world of so gret a ricches Which is yowre verry lod sterre here & stere Of eche good thyng that hath more þen plenty.77 In Charles’s usage here, however, the term does not appear as a rhyme-word, as it does in Roos and in Troilus. The term ‘lode-sterre’ also occurs in an amatory context in an anonymous balade (DIMEV 4170) found only in BL, MS Harley 7578, fol. 15v: ‘Whether it be that I be nigh or ferre | I misse the grace of you, my lode-sterre’.78 Skeat attributes this poem to Chaucer and refers the reader to Troilus for comparison; the poem appears to have been inspired in part by Troilus, and the reference to a lady as ‘lode-sterre’ was probably made in imitation of the term’s use there.79 Both ‘lode-sterre/werre’ rhymes in Troilus are spoken or written by Troilus. The first refers to Criseyde, at the start of book v, and the second occurs in Troilus’s letter towards the close of book v. The second citation’s syntax is ambiguous, and the phrase could refer to God or to Criseyde (a usage which underlines the religious context in which the term ‘lode-sterre’ was more usually employed as metaphor, subtly highlighting Troilus’s propensity to deify Criseyde): Who seth yow now, my righte lode-sterre? Who sit right now or stant in youre presence? Who kan conforten now youre hertes werre? (v, ll. 232–34) Byseche I yow, myn owen lady free,

75 For these kinds of usage, see, for example, Lydgate’s apostrophe to Saint Margaret at the start of The Lyfe of Seynt Margarete, ed. by Reames (‘dyrectyn, O blysful lode-sterre | Me and my penne’, l. 62), or the expression used in a short poem to Edward IV: ‘of al erthely princes thowe were the lode-sterre’, ‘King Edward the iiijth’ in Political, Religious and Love Poems, ed. by Furnivall, l. 30. A search on the CMEPV returned virtually no hits in which ‘lode-sterre’ (including variant spellings) was not used in either of these contexts, or as a literal term to refer to a star. The only exceptions to this were Chaucer’s use in Troilus, and Roos’s own use here in the Belle Dame. 76 For examples of this usage, see the entries under MED lode-sterre (n.), senses 1c and 1d. 77 Charles d’Orléans, Fortunes Stabilnes, ed. by Arn, Ballade 55, ll. 1947–50. The use of the lode-star metaphor here clearly responds to the expression in Charles’s French version of this poem, which refers to the heart’s lost love as ‘Celle qui est des princesses l’estoille’ (she who is the star of princesses). 78 Minor Poems, ed. by Skeat (2nd edn), ‘A Complaint to my Lodestar’, ll. 11–12. 79 Minor Poems, ed. by Skeat (2nd edn), p. 470 (see Skeat’s note to his title for the poem).

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That hereupon ye wolden write me, For love of God, my righte lode-sterre, That deth may make an ende of al my werre. (v, ll. 1390–94) That Troilus refers to Criseyde metaphorically as his ‘lode-sterre’ demonstrates the way in which he locates her rhetorically within a courtly behavioural code, and expects her to behave accordingly. Given that this code is primarily defined and exemplified through literature, Troilus’s courtly pursuit of Criseyde ties in with her inevitable betrayal of him. Both situations leave Criseyde with no choice: her part has been, quite literally, written for her. Pandarus creates an explicitly literary courtly scenario when beginning to persuade Criseyde to pledge her ‘trouthe’ to Troilus. Indeed, the dream that he invents and recounts to Criseyde in book ii owes more than a little to the Rose: the ‘gardeyn’ and ‘welle’, the ‘dartes’ and apostrophes to the God of Love are all direct references to the dreamer in the garden of Déduit (ii, ll. 505–53).80 The ambiguous use of ‘lode-sterre’ later in book v comes directly after a pointed reminder to Criseyde that she ‘thynketh on [her] trouthe’ (v, l. 1386), but which ‘trouthe’ must she consider? Troilus refers to her love, yet a contradictory ‘trouthe’, that of her ‘storie’, must come into play. Roos’s placement of the term ‘lode-sterre’ in the mouth of the Lover, particularly with its rhyming word ‘werre’, echoes specifically the usage in Troilus, and highlights through this connection the insincerity of his professed ‘trouthe’, and the way that the Lady, like Criseyde, is expected to conform to a literary tradition regardless of her own sentiments. This reading of Criseyde draws evident parallels between her character and that of the Lady: both are accused of cruelty and lack of ‘trouthe’ towards their male counterpart, both are judged by a courtly (specifically literary) code of conduct in which they are expected to participate, and in which they engage very reluctantly, if at all. It is significant that specific comparisons between Criseyde and the Lady were also being made within the Querelle, particularly in Achille Caulier’s second contribution, the Ospital d’amour. Here both characters are placed side by side in the literary context of faithless lovers of classical antiquity and the women that they betrayed, particularly as depicted by Ovid.81 This is a context which clearly finds an echo in Roos’s intertextual use of Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women. Although Caulier provocatively aligns the Lady and Criseyde together with the deceivers rather than the deceived, his reference to (for example) the well-known narrative of Dido and Aeneas shows clearly that, for him, part of engaging in the Querelle is to consciously situate the Lady and her behaviour in

80 Cf. Rose, vv. 1310–67 for the description of the dreamer in the garden, the fountain, and the God of Love’s menacing presence. 81 Caulier’s Ospital is saturated in Ovidian references, especially to the Heroides and the Metamorphoses (e.g. vv. 102–04, 109–12, 113–20, 125–28, 129–31, 457–64, 639–44), which are overlaid with a further, sustained tissue of references to the characters of the Roman de la rose — a text which, of course, situates itself in a direct line of descent from Ovid. Caulier, in the Ospital, thus subtly places himself in the generative line of Amours’s poets which Jean de Meun establishes in the Rose, and which passes from Ovid through Guillaume de Lorris to himself (Rose, vv. 10,526–94); and Ospital, e.g. vv. 681–88.

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the context of wider literary traditions — traditions with which Roos also engages through Chaucer. The narrator of the Ospital passes through a cemetery of disloyal lovers, where he sees the corpses of a series of literary characters gathered together in a kind of intertextual graveyard. These corpses include the body of ‘La dicte dame que l’en dit | Sans mercy’ (vv. 466–67; the said dame who was called sans mercy) who ‘Avec Briseyda couchoit, | Qui foy menty a Troylus’ (vv. 473–74; lay with Briseida, who broke her promise to Troilus). The Lady and Briseida/Criseyde are the only female faithless lovers to be mentioned by Caulier’s narrator: all the other bodies in the cemetery are very well-canvassed Ovidian men: Jason, Demophon, Aeneas, and Narcissus. The description of the cemetery of disloyal lovers weaves together a tight series of references to the stories of these men and the women who they betrayed: La vys je le corps de Jason Pour ce qu’il fu faulx a Medee. Emprés luy gisoit Demophon, Et d’autre part le faulx Enee Par qui Dido fu forsenee. Et le desdaigneux Narchisus, De qui Equo fu refusee, Gisoit a la pluye tout nus. (vv. 457–64) (There I saw the body of Jason, because he was false to Medea. Next to him lay Demophon, and on the other side false Aeneas, by whom Dido was driven mad. And disdainful Narcissus, by whom Echo was refused, lay naked, exposed to the rain.) Caulier, then, quite literally embeds the body of Chartier’s Lady into a collection of narratives which resonate with questions about women’s virtue, male duplicity, the power of literary text and tradition to determine reputation and apportion blame. These narratives also resonate with the potential for translation, and thus the potential to challenge or displace that power through further literary production. As Jean de Meun created an image of translatio through poetic lineage traced through dead poets reaching back to Ovid, so Caulier creates another such image here: the cemetery which displays these Ovidian remains brings them into generative juxtaposition with Chartier’s narrative and its responses. And the woman singled out to lie beside Chartier’s Lady in this deathbed of stories is Criseyde. Associations between the Lady as she appears in Roos’s translation and Chaucer’s Criseyde were certainly made by some English readers of both poems. We have already seen in Chapter 1 how the printer Richard Pynson marketed the Belle Dame as part of the 1526 Boke of Fame, a collection which was itself sometimes bound by readers with the Troilus and Criseyde which he issued in the same year. I suggested there that Pynson’s decision to create a Boke of Fame or ‘Femme’ may have been a direct response to de Worde’s anti-feminist edition of Troilus in 1517. The so-called Devonshire manuscript (BL, MS Add. 17492), a Tudor commonplace book dating from the 1530s to the early 1540s and compiled by members of Henry VIII’s court,

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forms further evidence that the Belle Dame and Troilus were consciously paired by some readers.82 On fols 89v–92r, it contains a sequence of extracts from the Belle Dame and several other poems, including Troilus and Criseyde, all copied in one hand into the manuscript from Thynne 1532. The other short extracts in the sequence are taken from Hoccleve’s Lepistre, Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, and an English translation of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris, in which the original lines have been altered to turn misogynist sentiment into praise of women.83 Anelida and Arcite and Hoccleve’s Lepistre are an interesting choice here: although Seaton has demonstrated conclusively that all of these extracts were copied from Thynne 1532 into the Devonshire manuscript, the copyist’s particular selection of texts from the printed volume to bring together has a strong precedent in the contents of fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies — four of the five complete manuscripts of the Belle Dame also contain Anelida and Arcite in some form, and three of these four also contain Hoccleve’s Lepistre.84 The copyist of this part of the Devonshire manuscript searched out texts which clearly had widespread and long-lasting resonances with one another. Heale has characterized this group of extracts as ‘utter[ing] with an unusual forcefulness a woman’s view of the dangers and doubleness of male rhetoric’.85 The inclusion of the Belle Dame stanzas (which Heale does not examine in her article) adds complexity to this characterization, for they comprise ll. 717–24 and ll. 229–36 of the poem, both of which, in fact, record exclusively the pleas of the Lover, rather than any words spoken by the Lady: O marble hert, and yet more harde, perdé, Whiche mercy may not perce for noo laboure, More stronge to bowe than is a mighty tre, What vayleth you to shewe so gret rigoure? Please it you more to se me dye this houre Before youre eyen, for youre disport and play, Then for to shewe summe comfort or socoure To respite dethe, whiche chacith me alwey? (ll. 717–24) Alas, what shulde be to you prejudice If that a man doo love you fastfully, To youre worship, eschewing every vise? So am I youres and wol be verreily; 82 On the coterie which owned and wrote in the Devonshire manuscript and the circumstances of its collaborative production, see Heale, ‘Women’ and Lerer, Courtly Letters, pp. 143–60. 83 See Seaton, ‘The Devonshire Manuscript’ for a list and set of references to their source texts and line numbers. Seaton incorrectly labels item no. 45, however, which she identifies as variant of another poem, rather than a translation of the Remedia Amoris. The altered Remedia-lines change ‘the cursydness yet and disceyte of women’ to ‘the faythfulnes yet and prayse of women’, a variation discussed by Heale, ‘Women’, p. 307. 84 I include Longleat 258 in this group as its contemporary contents list makes clear that it contained Lepistre at its inception, although the text is now missing from the manuscript; see further my discussion later in this chapter. Seaton, ‘Medieval Fragments’ presents the evidence that the manuscript was copied from Thynne 1532. 85 Heale, ‘Women’, p. 306.

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I chalang nought of right and reason why, For I am hole submytted to youre servise; Right as ye list it be, right so wol I To binde myself where I was in fraunches (ll. 229–36). If Heale is correct, and the group of stanzas on fols 89v–92r as a whole do comprise an attempt to articulate a woman’s perspective (whether they were copied by a woman or a man),86 then the inclusion of these stanzas from the Belle Dame might indicate a reading of that poem which tends towards a critique of the Lover and the overblown and suspect courtly rhetoric with which he persistently attempts to woo the Lady. Selecting and isolating these particular stanzas of the poem highlights the somewhat aggressive turn which the Lover’s speech takes, as the Lady persists in rebuffing him. Rhetorical questions such as ‘please it you more to se me dye’, defiant assertions that ‘I chalang nought of right and reason why’ and accusations of ‘gret rigoure’ and hard-heartedness demonstrate the ways in which his initial courtly persistence at times veers into downright verbal abuse. Just as the courtly lady is expected to (eventually) accept her suitor, so the courtly lover is expected to be persistent and faithful in serving her. The Lover is certainly persistent, and frequently protests that his ‘servise’ is ‘fastful’ (ll. 234, 230), but his aggressive language and stubborn repudiation of ‘Rason, Counseille, Wisdam and Good Advise’ (l. 653) simultaneously becomes particularly uncourtly as the poem progresses.87 Lerer has most recently read Devonshire’s sequence of extracts as ‘a miniature epistolary exchange’ of citations between male and female voices that consciously ‘mime[s] the [male-female] dialogues […] that shape such poems as La Belle dame sans merci’. This reading places the Belle Dame citations at the conceptual head of the ‘new poetic sequence’ created by the Devonshire scribe, TH2, as the sequence is imagined as being deliberately crafted from a selection of male and female voiced poems or parts of poems to mimic the debate structure of the Belle Dame.88 That the scribe chooses a series of extracts from Troilus as the culmination of this new debate sequence underlines the similarities between Criseyde’s situation and the Lady’s. The four citations from Troilus and Criseyde which close the group of excerpts on fols 89v–92r of the Devonshire manuscript chime particularly well with the extracts selected from the Belle Dame. They have been selected from the first part of book ii, in which Pandarus begins in earnest to push Criseyde towards an acceptance of Troilus’s love; when she is not the character speaking, Criseyde is the implied auditor of the words spoken, and, like the Lover’s words chosen from the Belle Dame, Pandarus’s speech to 86 The copying hand has been labelled by Helen Baron TH2, to indicate a very close similarity, or possible match, with the hand of Thomas Howard (TH), Margaret Douglas’s clandestine lover and illicit first husband, seen earlier in the manuscript; see Baron, ‘Mary (Howard) Fitzroy’s Hand’. 87 The way in which the Lover’s initial persistence veers into wilful stubbornness is, indeed, foreshadowed at its very opening. The very first words that the Lady speaks imply that similar scenes between herself and the Lover have taken place many times before, and that he has never received an encouraging answer: ‘Beau sire, ce fol pensement | Ne vous laissera il jamaiz?’ (vv. 221–22; good sir, will you never leave off these insane thoughts?). 88 Lerer, Courtly Letters, pp. 151–52.

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her at times verges on the abusive.89 Indeed, the Troilus excerpts are presented in the Devonshire manuscript in chronological order, so that they provide a mini-overview of the forced progression of Criseyde’s feelings towards Troilus leading up to their orchestrated first meeting and subsequent affair. This section of Troilus and Criseyde was significantly altered by Chaucer from Il Filostrato, in order to make this forced progression quite plain, and to emphasize the way in which Criseyde is manipulated into a situation, and a courtly role, that she will ultimately be quite unable to carry through. Of the four extracts chosen by the copyist for inclusion, the first and the last (Pandarus’s persuasion and Antigone’s song) are Chaucer’s own inventions.90 Moreover, the two extracts in which Criseyde deliberates about love have been significantly expanded by Chaucer from their corresponding versions in Il Filostrato. The sequence of extracts opens as Pandarus threatens Criseyde with potentially deadly consequences, if she is ‘so cruel’ (ll. 337, 342) as to reject Troilus’s love: If it be so that ye so cruel be That of his deth yow liste nought to recche, That is so trewe and worthi, as ye se, Namoore than of a japer or a wrecche— If ye be swich, youre beaute may not strecche To make amendes of so cruel a dede; Avysement is good byfore the nede! (ll. 337–43) Pandarus’s bullying rhetoric finds a counterpart in the two stanzas excerpted from the Belle Dame, especially the first, in which the Lover aggressively demands: Please it you more to se me dye this houre Before youre eyen, for youre disport and play, Then for to shewe summe comfort or socoure To respite dethe […]? (ll. 721–24) Indeed, this similarity is underlined by the fact that the copyist has changed the word ‘his’ to ‘my’ in line 338 of Pandarus’s speech: Pandarus is transformed into a lover like the Lover of the Belle Dame, pleading, arguing, and browbeating on his own account.91 The second extract from Troilus moves on to Criseyde’s conflicting feelings about love. Both of Criseyde’s excerpts express frustration at the situation of ‘we wrecched wommen’ when faced with the ‘strif ’ that is love, ‘the mooste stormy lyf […] that evere was bigonne’ (ll. 778–84). She goes on to articulate fear of ‘wikked tonges’ which could ‘speke us [i.e. women] harm’ and of the fact that ‘men ben so

89 The excerpts are: book ii: ll. 337–50 (Pandarus persuading Criseyde); ll. 778–84 (Criseyde deliberating); ll. 785–91 (Criseyde deliberating); and ll. 855–61 (Antigone’s song overheard by Criseyde). 90 Antigone’s song is added to Troilus by Chaucer; it is based largely on several songs by Machaut. Windeatt comments that this borrowing ‘suggests that he [Chaucer] had registered the example offered in Machaut’s poems of women analysing and reflecting on the virtues of their lovers’, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, pp. 118–21. 91 On further citations, adaptations, and creative uses of lines from Troilus in other contributions to the manuscript, see Lerer, Courtly Letters, pp. 144–48, 159.

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untrewe’ (l. 785–86); like the Lady, Criseyde expresses real fear at male speech and its power to undo female reputation.92 However, the final excerpt from Antigone’s song, overheard by Criseyde, expresses an opposing view, advocating total surrender to love: ‘whoso seith that for to love is vice […] he outher is envyous or right nyce’ (ll. 855–57).93 The chance overhearing of the song in the garden is, of course, one of the many factors which conspire to make Criseyde question her conclusion that love is nothing but a ‘stoormy lyf ’ and to go on to yield to Pandarus’s demands.94 Taken together, these excerpts provide a somewhat menacing chart of the ways in which Chaucer makes the key events which make up Criseyde’s ‘storie’ — both those orchestrated by Pandarus, and chance encounters (which are, of course, extra-diegetically orchestrated) — conspire against her, despite her wishes.

The Trace of the Belle Dame: Challenging Literary Authority The principal differences between the Lady and Chaucer’s Criseyde lie in their differing reception of a courtly code of conduct which is expected of them by their respective suitors. Criseyde herself, at the opening of her ‘storie’, initially acknowledges that […] man may love, of possibilite, A womman so, his herte may tobreste, And she naught love ayein, but if hire leste. (ii, ll. 607–09) On the one hand, Criseyde clearly starts with an idea that would seem to chime well with the attitude of the Lady: she is not obliged to return any man’s love if she does not wish to. However, the vocabulary she uses to articulate this betrays a consciousness of courtly terms and rhetoric and a willingness to employ them to articulate her own thoughts: obviously, a man’s heart is not literally going to ‘breste’ for lack of reciprocal love.95 The half-line ‘his herte may tobreste’ is added by Chaucer to his source, the Filostrato; he makes a point of lending a courtly nuance to Criseyde’s speech. Criseyde, from the very beginning of Chaucer’s text, is trapped in literary precedent, both in terms of the Trojan history in which she has a predefined role to play, and in terms of the courtly role in which Troilus and Pandarus cast her, and whose behavioural norms she is expected to imitate and 92 Cf. Lerer’s point that ‘slander and false report have both a literary and social resonance for Devonshire and its readers’; Lerer reads the manuscript in the context of epistolary surveillance at the court of Henry VIII, Courtly Letters, p. 152. 93 These lines are mistakenly attributed to Criseyde by Heale (‘Women’, p. 307), rather than to Antigone. 94 At a diegetic level, this episode does happen by chance; however, Butterfield’s recent discussion of its construction and introduction as an ‘intricately woven fabric of references’ to Boethius, Boccaccio, and Machaut reveals Chaucer’s careful extra-diegetic manipulation of the narrative to articulate the change in Criseyde’s sentiments, Familiar Enemy, pp. 299–303. 95 As the Lady comments laconically of her own, similar situation, ‘dyeth noon as for as I can se’, l. 616, translating Chartier’s ‘je n’en ay veu nul mourir’ (v. 588; I’ve not seen anyone dead of it yet). Criseyde’s use of the subjunctive ‘may’ is interesting; her grammar registers the possibility that the scenario she envisages is doubtful.

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uphold. Chaucer’s Criseyde and the unnamed Lady address the same question of literary authority in different ways: one cannot do other than accept the role she has been dealt by the male members (and writers) of her ‘storie’, while the other, anonymous and unhampered by a personal literary and historical tradition, is able to refuse outright any participation in the courtly discourse in which the Lover attempts to place her: of his hert [he] hath slepir holde, That only for beholding of an eye Cannat abide in peas, as resoun wolde. (ll. 263–65) Roos picks up this idea in a complex image which he adds to the end of Chartier’s Envoy to the poem (and thus its original close), destabilizing still further the idea that the Lady is to be blamed for her actions. Chartier warns ‘vous, dames et damoiselles’ (you ladies and young women) to be careful ‘Que ja nulle de vous ressemble’ (vv. 793–97; that none of you resemble) the Lady. Roos chooses to render these lines using a particular image which has explicit literary undertones concerning the negotiation of prior authority in literary creation, and the importance of the physical book in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of a text: And ye ladyes, or what astate ye be […] in noo wise ne folow not the trace Of hire that here is named […] La belle dame sans mercy. (ll. 821–29) The MED defines ‘trace’ as ‘a course of action, a way of life’, and provides the compounds ‘folwen (seuen, taken) the trace’, meaning ‘to follow someone’s example’. It also provides a physical definition: ‘a human track or trail, a mark or sign’. The term is used in a yet more specific context by Lydgate in his Troy Book to indicate the literary ‘traces’ left by Chaucer before him: And in this lond yif ther any be In borwe or town, village or cité That konnyng hath his tracis for to swe […] To hym I make a direccioun Of this boke to han inspeccioun, Besechyng hem with her prudent loke To race and skrape thorughoute al my boke, Voide and adde wher hem semeth nede. (v, ll. 3531–39, my emphasis) Here the concept of ‘following traces’ is linked to the action of ‘racing’ and ‘scraping’ text from the surface of a manuscript, ‘voiding’ and ‘adding’ where the reader feels the text needs improvement or alteration. We are dealing both with metaphorical traces, the trace of Chaucer’s greatness, his vernacular ‘auctoritee’, and literal traces, the inscription and removal of letters on the page, the way any author’s text can be taken and physically re-authored by a scribe or reader. Lydgate’s Troy Book was completed in 1420, four years before Chartier composed the Belle dame sans mercy, and thus at least that long before Roos translated it into English. The term ‘trace’ therefore had

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metaphorical currency as an expression linked to discussions of vernacular authority at the time Roos was writing. Roos taps into these meanings when he adds the term to the Belle Dame, creating a complex image which brings together Chartier’s ambiguity concerning the Lady’s guilt and the intertextual use of Chaucer’s work that he, Roos, has made in the course of his translation. On the surface, women are warned not to follow the example of the Lady; she is to be castigated and is ‘rightwisly’ named ‘sans mercy’. However, the secondary meaning of ‘trace’ as literary trope or precedent links up with the very reason that the Lady must be seen as merciless in the first place: she is trapped and condemned by traces, the authority of literary convention. ‘The trace | Of hire, that here is named’ is in fact what must be questioned, rather than her merciless behaviour. Chaucer, significantly, plays on a third meaning of the word ‘trace’ — ‘a procession or line’ — in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women when he describes the ‘traas’ of ‘wymen’ who follow the God of Love. Like the heroines of the Legend, ‘trewe of love thise women were echon’ (F; ll. 285–90). The women not only form a formal procession and an example to others; they are also, like the Lady, participants in, and created by literary traces. Roos intimates that such traces should not necessarily be ‘folowe[d]’ without question, for, as Chaucer shows in the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, literary authority is not absolute, the traces laid before can be altered or erased, scraped away, and rewritten in translation. Roos alerts us to the multiple resonances of the term ‘trace’ within his translation. It is a term he has already used prior to its appearance at the end of the poem to describe the series of processional dance-steps trodden by the Lover and the Lady which precede and prefigure their conversation: ‘To this lady he came ful curtesly, | When he thought tyme to daunce with hire a trace’ (ll. 189–90).96 In this stanza, the word ‘trace’ is rhymed by Roos with the narrator’s description of ‘my place’ behind the trellis, eavesdropping: this privileged ‘place’ allows him to convert the overheard debate into the written ‘trace’ of the poem. This trace will both make the Lady into an example to other women and reveal her devastating challenge to other literary traces. Roos’s formulation of female textual ‘renom’ or reputation as a ‘trace’ could, of course, be equally well applied to the Querelle which followed Chartier’s text. Here too, there is a distinct and heightened awareness of the extremely physical, bibliographical nature of the construction and destruction of literary authority.97 The Lady is named, ‘famed’, and de-famed through textual traces, and the immense body of documents which made up the Querelle is incessantly altered in a physical sense through the addition

96 Translating Chartier’s ‘L’amoureux sa dame menoit | Danser, quant venoit a son tour’ (vv. 161–62; The lover took his lady into the dance, when it was his turn). 97 Compare Swift’s comments on the Erreurs du jugement de la belle dame sans mercy, a Querelle-text which carefully responds to those of Herenc and Caulier and which implicitly figures the Lady as a book to be picked through: ‘the text of the Erreurs is a revised record […] resulting from the gathering together and sifting through of different prior representations of the Lady. […] A metatextual consciousness of recycling textual representations is […] present throughout’, ‘A Poetics of Mourning’, pp. 158–59.

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of new compositions and the individual creation of different manuscript copies and collections of texts. As we have seen, Roos appears to be acutely aware of the way in which the Querelle-manuscript book ‘becomes’ the Lady, in the sense that it builds her, text by text, through repeated acts of reading, interpretation, and reinscription. This and other details should be read alongside the connections which Roos makes with Chaucer’s work: his decision to employ references to Troilus and Criseyde in particular work as a way of articulating his own contribution to the debate through translation. Appreciating this entails reconsidering the driving force behind Roos’s deployment of Chaucer, removing the Belle Dame from the category of ‘Chaucerian apocrypha’, a non-canonical piece of ‘Chaucer-like’ writing which has been mistakenly considered as Chaucer’s, but is now safely excised from the canon. The links made by Roos with Chaucer are not simply about similarity or imitation; reading Roos’s Belle Dame involves recognizing that Roos uses Chaucer creatively and generatively to contribute to a larger poetic discussion.

The Belle Dame in Manuscript Surviving manuscripts of Roos’s translation of the Belle dame form an important way into thinking about these complex connections, and I want to focus on one of these manuscripts for the remainder of this chapter. I have already discussed the ways in which particular details of layout, such as speaker markers or rubrics, serve, in the majority of Belle Dame manuscripts, as a way of linking the translation to other copies of the Belle dame through presentation. Here, I focus on the contents of a particular manuscript. As is well known, the way in which Roos’s text was anthologized by its early readers often reinforces the connections Roos makes with Chaucer’s work: we have already seen how one contributor to the Devonshire manuscript, for example, chose to anthologize extracts from the Belle Dame alongside selected extracts from Troilus and Criseyde. The Findern manuscript, too, as Appleton and Doyle have extensively explored, anthologizes the Belle Dame alongside Anelida’s ‘compleynte’ from Anelida and Arcite, the Tale of Thisbe from the Legend of Good Women, the Complaint of Venus, and Hoccleve’s Lepistre de Cupide.98 This manuscript has been described by Kara Doyle as the product of a ‘fifteenth-century female interpretive community’ which deliberately and carefully ‘selected and juxtaposed’ texts as a way of engaging in ‘playful debate’ about their themes and content.99 Very often, she argues, this debate revolves around the experiences of women on the receiving end of masculine courtly discourse: the Belle Dame clearly has an important role to play

98 Doyle, ‘Thisbe out of Context’ and Appleton, ‘Intertextuality and Gender’, pp. 102–29 for close readings of this group of texts as they appear within the Findern manuscript. 99 Doyle, ‘Thisbe out of Context’, pp. 257, 241, 240.

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in the manuscript’s interrogation of this theme.100 Richard Pynson’s 1526 print of the Belle Dame, as we saw in Chapter 1, groups it alongside the House of Fame and a series of other texts by or related to women: there, I argued that Pynson’s choice and arrangement of texts can be seen as more than simply an inaccurate attempt to present a selection of works as ‘by’ Chaucer. Appleton and Doyle’s work, too, suggests that the compilers of Findern were also interested in tracing thematic connections between texts, rather than in separating material by Chaucer from ‘Chaucerian’ material.

Rethinking the Chaucerian Codex: Longleat 258 In the final part of this chapter, I want to consider a third manuscript of the Belle Dame from this perspective: Longleat House, Marquess of Bath, MS Longleat 258. At its first full, published description by Eleanor Prescott Hammond in 1905, Longleat 258 was designated ‘a Chaucerian codex’.101 It is unclear, as so often with this adjective, precisely what Hammond means by ‘Chaucerian’ — but, again, it appears to serve a dual purpose, both to describe the manuscript as one containing works by Chaucer, but also works which are seen as imitative or derivative of Chaucer’s. Hammond goes on to refer to it as one of ‘the manuscripts of interest to students of Chaucer and his followers’.102 The four Chaucer texts transmitted in Longleat 258 (The Complaint of Mars, Pity, Anelida and Arcite, and The Parliament of Fowls) are thus implicitly conceived of as forming the thematic core or focal point of the manuscript, and the non-Chaucer texts with which they travelled are defined by their relationship to Chaucer, work of ‘his followers’, which clusters around his contributions. The manuscript is still often referred to in a very similar way. A very recent commentator, for example, stresses its importance as a transmitter of ‘poems by Chaucer and Lydgate [which] […] contributed to the formation of the canon of the works of these authors’,103 while Symons, in her recent edition of the Belle Dame, suggests that Longleat 258 ‘place[s] it in the familiar Chaucerian context’.104 A recent article on the Assembly of Ladies similarly characterizes Longleat 258 as ‘essentially a collection of Chaucer’s and Chaucerian secular love poems’.105 Boffey and Thompson, in a still-influential discussion, describe Longleat 258 as part of a broader trend in mid- to late fifteenth-century anthology manuscripts: ‘the nucleus of such manuscripts was generally formed by an assortment of Chaucer’s minor poems, around which were fitted attempts to redistill the influential “aureat licour”’.106 Other manuscripts which they point to as forming part of this trend include the so-called 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

Doyle, ‘Thisbe out of Context’, p. 243. Hammond, ‘Chaucerian Codex’. Hammond, ‘Chaucerian Codex’, p. 77 (my emphasis). Connolly, ‘Compiling the Book’, p. 131. Chaucerian Dream Visions, introduction. Marshall, ‘The Assembly of Ladies’, p. 61. Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, p. 280.

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‘Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts’ — described and linked by Hammond in 1908 — whose contents and make-up show close association with Longleat 258.107 It is useful here to recall Gillespie’s comments about the Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts. Gillespie notes that, in establishing ‘a useful shorthand for future scholars’ by naming the group, Hammond also performs another, more ideological manoeuvre. ‘The author, Chaucer, becomes a “principle of thrift”, enabling discussion of a group of late fifteenth-century collections of verse’. Labelling Longleat 258 a ‘Chaucerian codex’, linking it to the ‘Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts’, does something very similar: it implicitly conditions readers to approach it with divisions between ‘Chaucer’ and ‘non-Chaucer’ material firmly in mind, and with an eye to all non-Chaucer texts as somehow derivative of Chaucer. Other kinds of relationships set up between texts in the codex are unlikely to be remarked upon, if gathering works by Chaucer as a conceptual nucleus to draw in ‘Chaucerian’ texts is considered the focal point of the collection. However, Gillespie also suggests of the Oxford Group that the authorial principle here does not wholly close down as well as disclose meaning. There are other ways of thinking about these books. They are exactly the sort of volumes in which an author […] might vanish108 rather than automatically forming the ‘principle’ by which the books’ contents are defined. What happens, then, if we make the concept of ‘the Chaucerian’ vanish from view when considering Longleat 258? How might such a repositioning change our approach to its contents and structure? The verso of the final folio of Longleat 258 contains a Latin contents list in the hand of the scribe who copied the texts, which shows that two pieces are now missing from its opening, Hoccleve’s Lepistre de Cupide (‘Littera directa cupidinis amatoribus’) and the unidentified ‘unum carmen’ (a song). Its remaining contents are as follows: Templum vitreum [Lydgate, The Temple of Glass] De folio et flore [The Flower and the Leaf, missing due to the loss of a quire]109 Exclamacio Martis [Chaucer, Complaint of Mars, missing first six stanzas due to loss of same quire] Exclamacio de morte pietatis [Chaucer, Pity] Congregacio dominarum [The Assembly of Ladies] Exclamacio Annelide contra Arcite [Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite] Parliamentum auium [Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls] De oculo & corde [The Eye and the Heart] La bele dame sans mercy [Roos, Belle Dame] De rustico & aue [Lydgate, The Churl and the Bird]110

107 Kinship between Longleat 258 and the Oxford Group is discussed by Hammond, ‘Chaucerian Codex’, p. 78 and Chaucer, pp. 325–405, and by Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies and Miscellanies’, pp. 280–83. 108 Gillespie, Print Culture, pp. 112–13. 109 Cf. Hammond, ‘Chaucerian Codex’, p. 78. 110 See Hammond, ‘Chaucerian Codex’, p. 78, found at fol. 147v.

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While this manuscript clearly does contain some works by Chaucer, is it necessarily (or is it only) ‘a manuscript of Chaucer’s works’ or ‘a Chaucerian codex’? It now opens with Lydgate’s Temple of Glass; originally (according to the contents list) it opened with Hoccleve’s Lepistre. Both of these texts might be conceptualized as ‘Chaucerian’, in the sense that both embed explicit intertextual references to particular works by Chaucer within their narrative frameworks. As we saw in Chapter 1, however, indebtedness to Chaucer is by no means the only lens through which these texts can be viewed, and this indebtedness is perhaps less comprehensive and more partial than it has been hitherto described. Focusing on Longleat 258 as transmitting ‘Chaucer and Chaucerian’ texts puts Chaucer firmly at the heart of the manuscript, and suggests that a relationship with his works is automatically the defining feature of all the texts in it. Rather than placing Chaucer at the metaphorical centre of the codex, we could alternatively consider it as a manuscript which shows a central interest in English translations of French-language debate poetry, and in gathering them together with a variety of complementary works which also stage different kinds of debates and/ or scenes and processes of interpretative judgement. This reading of Longleat 258 focuses attention on the placement of the Belle Dame directly next to de oculo et corde and de rustico et aue in the manuscript as a trio of fifteenth-century English translations of French-language debates.111 All three poems dramatize discussion or argument between two opposing characters, discussion which is in each case carefully framed at opening and close by the comments of a third figure, who sometimes holds the office of narrator-transcriber of the debate (Belle Dame, Eye and Heart), sometimes translator (Belle Dame, Churl and Bird). In the case of the Belle Dame, a double framing-device is used, as Chartier’s own narrator’s framework is itself framed again by the translator’s Prologue and Envoy added by Roos. The Eye and the Heart, too, could be described as using multiple and interlocking frameworks, as it stages a series of differently articulated debates between the same figures, each one framed by the dreamer-narrator’s comments, and undertaken before progressively more important judges.112 Lydgate’s Temple of Glass, as Boffey discusses, comprises a dreaming narrator’s rendition of layers of ‘appeal and response’ from different characters, represented by structural division of the narrative, and changes in poetic

111 De oculo et corde, or The Eye and the Heart, is the only known manuscript copy of a Middle English translation of Michault Taillevent’s Le Débat du cœur et de l’œil. Taillevent’s poem is dated by its editor to c. 1444. See Hammond, ‘The Eye and the Heart’ for Longleat 258’s text, and Deschaux, Michault Taillevent, pp. 190–229 for an edition of Taillevent’s Débat. In addition to its survival in Longleat 258, The Eye and the Heart was also printed by Wynkyn de Worde in a quarto pamphlet (dated by ESTC?1516): A lytel tretyse called the dysputacyon or co[m]playnte of the herte thorughe perced with the lokyng of the eye (ESTC S105369). Lydgate’s De rustico et ave, or The Churl and the Bird features a translator’s voice which frames the poem with explicit claims to have translated it ‘out of Frenssh’ (l. 34; ll. 383–84); see Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ii, ed. by McCracken, pp. 468–85, Wolfgang, ‘Out of the Frenssh’, and Cartlidge, ‘The Source’. 112 On the structural complexity of Taillevent’s poem, see Deschaux, Michault Taillevent, p. 331.

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form.113 The Parliament of Fowls, of course, complements these choices, featuring both sustained debate between a multitude of voices before Nature, and a carefully marked shift to a closing ‘roundel’ of which ‘the note […] imaked was in Fraunce’.114 Roos’s Belle Dame, too, makes careful use of variation in poetic form to distinguish different kinds of utterance, as does Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, a poem which, as we have seen, very often appears in other manuscripts with the Belle Dame.115 We could also consider the common focus on embedded documents within the Longleat poems, and on the way in which transcription of speech acts dramatizes the creation of these documents as part of the fictional narratives. So, Chaucer’s Pity features an embedded bill of complaint, while the Assembly of Ladies is famous for the way in which it stages the oral performance of such bills. Lepistre, originally the opening text in Longleat 258, takes the form of an official document formally issued out of Cupid’s court.116 The Longleat scribe’s Latin contents list, furthermore, appears to emphasize quite deliberately the adversarial and verbally combative qualities of several of the texts in the manuscript, so that the overarching theme of debate or disagreement between two opposing parties is brought out repeatedly in the way in which s/he indexes the texts. So, for example, Anelida and Arcite is titled ‘exclamacio Annelide contra Arcite’. The formulation ‘De x et y’ recurs three times, to foreground the debates between the flower and the leaf, the eye and the heart, and the churl and the bird. The obvious exception to this, of course is the debate between the Lover and the Lady in the Belle Dame itself: ‘la bele dame sans mercy’ is the only text in the contents list which retains a vernacular title, even though it could clearly have been reworded.117 I have already discussed the potential significance of Roos’s decision to embed Chartier’s French sobriquet for the Lady into his translation, and his particular reference to it as, simultaneously, the title of Chartier’s poem. The Longleat scribe’s use of this title in the midst of his otherwise Latin contents list testifies further to a widespread awareness

113 Boffey, Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions, p. 18. Bianco, ‘Black Monk’, p. 65 discusses the Temple of Glass’s important affiliations with earlier French dits. A copy of De Worde’s undated print of Eye and Heart was bound with his 1517 Troilus and Criseyde and his 1506? Temple of Glass alongside several other texts in the so-called ‘Farmer Sammelband’, discussed by Gillespie alongside the ‘Oxford Group’, Print Culture, pp. 111–13. 114 Butterfield examines the refrain Qui bien aime a tart oblie, which is inserted as the announced roundel in three manuscripts of the Parliament and which — alongside its broader history of citation — ‘testifies to the pervasive Anglo-French rather than narrowly English culture of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’, Familiar Enemy, pp. 248–49. 115 In Harley 372, Anelida shares a quire (no. 4) and a scribe with the Belle Dame. In the Devonshire manuscript, part of Anelida’s ‘compleynte’ is anthologized alongside extracts from the Belle Dame. Anelida is also copied in the Findern manuscript in proximity to the Belle Dame, and the texts occur in the same booklet (booklet 1) in the Fairfax manuscript. 116 Boffey comments that Longleat’s compiler’s ‘activities in accumulating material around Chaucer’s dream poems were informed by an acquaintance with both French and English texts and a lively awareness of current subjects of literary debate’, ‘English Dream Poems’, p. 121. This summary, whilst acknowledging the cross-Channel literary concerns of Longleat, and its thematic focus on debate, still places Chaucer as the conceptual driving force behind its production. 117 Compare the appearance of the same title, La bele dame sanz mercy, within the contents list of Fairfax 16 (fol. 2r–v), which is otherwise in English.

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that the words ‘la bele dame sans mercy’ encode a tradition of poetic continuation and debate. As such, the title is a recognizable touchstone which identifies the poem, not along national lines such as ‘English’ or ‘French’ but along cultural lines as a foundational debate text which prompted a plethora of literary rewritings. The pairing of The Eye and the Heart with the Belle Dame in Longleat 258 is particularly significant in this context, given that Taillevent’s French poem forms part of a wider group of fifteenth-century debate texts which very often cluster around some form of the Querelle in fifteenth-century continental manuscript anthologies.118 Out of seventeen manuscript copies now extant, in eleven cases, the Débat du cœur et de l’œil is anthologized with Chartier’s Belle dame sans mercy, very often with other Querelle-texts as well, while in two further cases, it is anthologized with other texts by Chartier, or with Querelle-texts.119 Intriguingly, one anthology which gathers it with the Belle dame is BL, MS Royal 19 A III, the English Querelle-manuscript I examined earlier. This manuscript, we recall, contains Chartier’s Belle dame, Herenc’s Accusations contre la Belle dame, Chartier’s Bréviaire des nobles, the Débat du cœur et de l’œil, and a variety of anonymous debate poems, some of which are also often associated with works by Chartier, and with one another in other manuscripts. In certain manuscripts, the Débat is linked extremely closely to the Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy; for example, in Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, MS vat. lat. 4794, the Débat is situated at the culmination of a sequence of Querelle-texts which opens with the Belle dame, the two letters, and the Excusacion (fols 66r–78v). There is not space here for an extensive discussion of Taillevent’s Débat, nor its Middle English translation — consideration of which is long overdue.120 Taillevent’s debate intriguingly revisits and reworks some of the Belle dame’s most characteristic narrative moments.121 It opens with a first-person author-narrator figure who comes

118 Cf. Cayley’s comments on the range of debates, such as the Cœur et œil, which are ‘inspirés par la Querelle de la Belle Dame sans mercy, tant pour leur contenu que pour leur structure formelle poetique’ and which are ‘marqués par l’esprit d’engagement poétique et participatoire qui régnait à cette époque’. Cayley, ‘Polyphonie’, p. 47. Taillevent’s poetry is marked elsewhere by close formal and intertextual engagement with Chartier’s work; for example, his Psautier des Vilains responds specifically to Chartier’s Bréviaire des nobles, discussed by Armstrong, Virtuoso Circle, pp. 44–54. 119 These eleven manuscripts are: BnF, MSS fr. 2264, fr. 924, and Rothschild 440 (I, 04, 31); Vienna, ÖNB, MS 2619; BaV, MS vat. lat. 4794; Stockholm, KB, MS V.u.22; Paris, Mus. Jacquemart André, MS 11 (686); Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MSS 3523 and 3521; BL, MS Royal 19 A III; and Copenhagen, KB, MS NKS 1768 folio. The manuscript which anthologizes the Débat with other Chartier texts not including the Belle dame is BnF, MS nouv. acq. fr. 4511-4512-4513 (once a single manuscript, now split into three parts; Débat found in part 4512); the manuscript which includes the Débat alongside parts of the Querelle (but not the Belle dame itself, or any other texts by Chartier) is BnF, MS fr. 1169. 120 The Eye and the Heart appears to have been pretty well ignored, critically speaking, since Hammond first published it as it appears in the Longleat manuscript. This is probably in part due to the rather negative comments with which she introduces the poem (‘The Eye and the Heart’, p. 264: ‘the shortcomings of this text are many’). 121 See Deschaux’s comments on the way in which Taillevent’s poem consciously negotiates the ‘genre tradtionnel du débat amoureux’, particularly Chartier’s major contributions to this genre in the early fifteenth century, and Charles d’Orléans’s use of ‘dédoublement’ or doubling of the self in order to probe the psychological experience of love, Michault Taillevent, pp. 329–31, esp. n. 83.

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upon a courtly gathering of ladies and gentlemen and is invited, as the Belle dame’s narrator is, to join in the festivities. Rather than becoming preoccupied with the behaviour of a frustrated lover, however, the narrator becomes that lover; the single member of the party who draws his gaze by stepping apart from the gathering is not (as intrigues Chartier’s narrator) a disappointed suitor, but a lady who will duly disappoint him by her hauteur and unavailability, once he is smitten. The debate which the narrator then overhears and transcribes is not between a lover and a lady — as the narrator himself has taken the role of frustrated lover, and his putative lady has disappeared from the poem altogether by stanza 24 — but between his own eye and his own heart, as each blames the other for the misery of his unrequited love. The motif of love irrevocably entering the heart through the unguardedness of the eye, and the opposition of the two, is a very frequent literary trope throughout the Middle Ages.122 In the Belle dame, for example, the Lover opens by evoking a complex image of the Lady’s ‘yeulx’ (v. 227; eyes) which have written him a letter rebuffing him, even as the ‘Herault’ (v. 230; Herald) who transmits this letter to him is personified as her ‘Doux Regard’ (v. 229; Sweet Looks), the sight of whom persuades his ‘cueur’ (v. 224; heart) that the letter’s contents must be read as meaning the opposite of what they say. The Lady responds with the first of her many detailed attempts to undo the complex hyperbole of her suitor’s courtly rhetoric: ‘Il […] fait de son cueur lache garde | Qui, contre ung tout seul regard d’eul, | Sa paix et sa joye ne garde’ (vv. 233–36; he does not guard well his heart who, just because of a simple glance, voluntarily loses his peace and joy). Eyes are made for looking at things; they have no connection with the heart, nor can they write letters, and the heart cannot be moved to love by ‘ung tout seul regard d’eul’ (a simple glance from an eye). Taillevent initially uses the heart/eye opposition in a nuanced way to explore the contradictory and agonized psychological state of a courtly lover: the narrator, falling asleep tormented with love for his absent lady, dreams that he overhears the verbal tussle between his own heart and eye, two facets of his own self which are set at debate with one another. Yet this searching self-exploration ultimately develops into a hyperbolic scenario which implicitly articulates a critique of overblown courtly rhetoric that chimes well with the anti-courtly standpoint so powerfully articulated by Chartier’s Lady. As the Débat progresses, the eponymous ‘Cœur’ and ‘Œil’ move from verbal sparring to physical fight, in the form of an elaborate joust in front of the God of Love, which the narrator attends as a spectator. Taillevent’s extended description of the lists, the field, the horses, armour, and attendants of the two combatants, their formal challenges and their physical battle verges on the absurd, particularly as he refers to them persistently as ‘le cuer’ and ‘l’ueil’ throughout.123 By doing so, he never allows his readers fully to imagine them as a pair of jousting 122 See, e.g. Hammond, ‘Eye and Heart’, p. 236 and Deschaux, Michault Taillevent, pp. 328–29, esp. n. 82. 123 Like the speaker markers signalling the voices of the Lady and the Lover in the Belle dame, copies of Taillevent’s poem sometimes contain speaker markers which trace the debate between the ‘le cuer’ and ‘l’ueil’. The translation of The Eye and the Heart in the Longleat manuscript features the speaker markers ‘Ye’ and ‘Hert’: unlike the markers which habitually travel with the English Belle Dame, these are in English.

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knights, instead periodically conjuring up comic images of a giant eye and a giant heart, on horseback, armed to the hilt, grappling to the death. Taillevent punctures the well-known trope of the courtly lover’s internal torment by pushing that trope to ridiculous extremes, just as Chartier’s Lady punctures it through ruthless and determined interrogation of its basic presuppositions and articulation. In terms of its content, then, Longleat 258 can be conceptualized as fitting texts by Chaucer and others around a central preoccupation with the tradition, mechanics, and, on occasion, translation of amatory debate, just as easily as it can be described as transmitting texts by Chaucer with an attached group of ‘Chaucerian’ texts. Longleat 258, in fact, bears more than a passing resemblance — thematically speaking — to many of the French-language codices which collect Chartier’s Belle dame and Querelle-texts with further debate poetry. Intriguingly, it bears a codicological similarity to some of these codices too. Each of its quires is constructed from vellum outer and inner leaves, with paper leaves in between. This feature — alongside some of its textual affiliations — has linked it to the Oxford Group, particularly Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Bodley 638, which exhibits the same paper and vellum construction.124 Unlike the other members of the Oxford Group, which have been assembled from discrete ‘booklets’ of texts, both Longleat’s and Bodley’s texts are copied across breaks between quires and often end mid-quire.125 This feature suggests that their quires and choice of text were not assembled ‘piecemeal’, booklet by booklet, but in each case were specifically designed to go in the current order. Boffey and Thompson suggest, however, that their very distinctive paper and vellum construction could be inspired by knowledge of a manuscript which had been assembled using ‘discrete textual and physical units’, and a desire to emulate that ‘look’, ‘feel’, or aesthetic quality.126 Such a ‘look’ or construction visually connects the Longleat manuscript to the kinds of paper and vellum booklet Querelle-manuscripts discussed by McRae, of which Royal 19 A III is one example. Longleat 258’s preservation of the Eye and the Heart, otherwise unattested in manuscript, alongside the Belle Dame potentially strengthens this impression: did the creator or commissioner of the manuscript set out to make an English-language codex which resembled French-language manuscripts such as Royal 19 A III, in which a variety of amatory and social debates are clustered together, often in the context of some form of the Querelle? Viewed from this perspective, Longleat 258 potentially suggests a readership which was interested in the way in which a series of conflicting voices are constructed and narrated within a variety of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century verse texts, several of them translated from French, rather than a reader compiling a ‘Chaucerian codex’. Following this reading, Roos’s Belle Dame is a thematically central text in this codex — not because of any putative similarity to Chaucer, but because it translates, and contributes to, one of the most widely read and disseminated debates of the fifteenth century.

124 See Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies’, pp. 280–83. 125 On the booklet construction of the Oxford Group manuscripts, see Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies’, MS Tanner 346, ed. by Robinson, p. xxv and Norton Smith, Bodleian Library MS Fairfax 16. 126 Boffey and Thompson, ‘Anthologies’, pp. 281–82.

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Chapter 6

An ABC to the Virgin

It might seem perverse or wrongheaded to end this book by discussing a translation which, as far as we can tell, is by Chaucer himself, given that so much of its focus throughout has been on foregrounding perspectives other than ‘the Chaucerian’ through which to approach the translations it considers.1 In the foregoing chapters, I have argued for a critical acknowledgement that these texts may be conceptualized as deriving from a more plural, less uniquely Chaucer-centric culture of translation and discussion than we have necessarily allowed for: undoing some of the effects of the label ‘Chaucerian’, making Chaucer temporarily absent from the picture, has opened up a space in which to explore alternative connections, translatorly processes, and networks of textual relationships. As we saw in Chapter 1, the adjective ‘Chaucerian’ possesses a double and contradictory application: it denotes both the imitative, ‘Chaucer-style’ work, and the authentic Chaucer text to which that work is so often subordinated. An ABC can be read in both senses of the term, as an ‘authentic-Chaucerian’ translation from French which has itself suffered from subordination to critical definitions and constructions of ‘the Chaucerian’, in the sense of the ‘ideal’ poetic, aesthetic, and translatorly practice which is so often associated with Chaucer.2 An ABC is routinely classed critically as a minor poem, an overly derivative translation which, like the Romaunt, must (therefore) date from an early period in Chaucer’s life.3 Its particular formal virtuosity has contributed to this characterization, leading some to read the poem as the technical exercise of a beginner poet-in-training.4 And its Marian focus has played a significant role in critical neglect of the poem, for it presents us with a

1 An ABC is extant, in whole or in part, in sixteen manuscript copies, of which four contain a contemporary attribution to Chaucer: Coventry, City Record Office, MS Accession 325/1; Cambridge, Magdalen Coll., MS Pepys 2006 (two copies of the text, both incomplete, both containing an attribution); and London, Lambeth Palace (olim Sion College), MS Arch.L.40.2/E.44. A full list is found in Riverside, p. 1185. 2 Dor discusses the ‘longue tradition de désintérêt, voire de mépris’ (long tradition of disinterest, if not scorn) which has characterized the critical reception of An ABC, ‘L’ABC de Chaucer’, p. 407. 3 Skeat described An ABC as ‘a translation of just that unambitious character which requires no great experience’, Minor Poems, p. xlvii. Derek Brewer asserts that it is ‘negligible as poetry’, Chaucer, p. 31. Laila Z. Gross, writing in Riverside, notes that ‘most critics have dismissed the poem as one of the least interesting and most derivative’ works in the canon (p. 1076). 4 Crampton discusses this view, ‘Chaucer’s Singular Prayer’, pp. 192, 194, but instead proposes a reading of An ABC’s formal complexity as an ‘act of worship’, p. 193. Guillaume de Deguileville, Livre du Pèlerin, ed. and trans. by Edwards and Maupeu, pp. 34, 953 discusses the formal virtuosity of the poem translated by Chaucer. To avoid confusion, I term the French poem The a.b.c. (using minuscules) and the Middle English translation An ABC (using capitals).

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profoundly ‘Catholic, devotional, orthodox Chaucer’, a neglected Chaucerian identity which was firmly rejected in the wake of the Reformation, and with which we are still not always entirely comfortable: one which does not, many have argued, conform to our preferred critical image of Chaucer.5 To conclude with An ABC is to suggest that Chaucer too, perhaps paradoxically, might suffer from the label ‘Chaucerian’, or from the kinds of ‘Chaucerianism’ which we most readily associate with him. These considerations make An ABC an appropriate endpoint for this book; so, too, does the fact that it might be conceptualized as another example of translation out of contest. Like the Roman de la rose and the Belle dame sans mercy, The a.b.c. was part of a conflicted textual and interpretative tradition which spanned Europe during the late Middle Ages, and which surrounded Guillaume de Deguileville’s c. 1330 dream vision Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine.6 The translation of a single prayer to the Virgin Mary from this immense, complex, and widely read pilgrimage allegory, An ABC exists not simply as a minor or uninteresting part of the Chaucer canon; it also exists in conversation with the traditions of transmission which surround Deguileville’s poem. Chaucer’s ABC and its transmission history participates actively in — indeed, constructs — an interpretative response to the poetic tradition associated with Deguileville’s text.7 The nature of that response, coupled with An ABC’s supposed ‘derivativeness’ as a translation, is complicated and deepened by the extent to which the Pèlerinage itself is comprised of a thoroughly and designedly fluctuating textual tradition, extant in two rather different authorial recensions (which I term Vie 1 and Vie 2), rather than existing as an immutable entity to which An ABC might have a fixed or uniform relationship. The fluidity within the Pèlerinage’s own transmission history must render it problematic to characterize An ABC as derivative translation, and the prayer thus poses a particularly pointed challenge to a critical framework







5 Quinn, ‘Chaucer’s Problematic Prière’, p. 109. Quinn asserts that ‘the critical neglect of Chaucer’s prière entails an opposition between Catholic and non-Catholic perspectives that goes back to the Reformation’, p. 110. Chaucer and Religion, ed. by Phillips, confronts and critiques recurrent critical desires to construct a profoundly secular, sceptical, non-orthodox Chaucer: e.g. Cooper, ‘Introduction’, pp. i–xix; Phillips, ‘The Matter of Chaucer’, p. 70; Reames, ‘Mary, Sanctity and Prayers’, p. 85. Cooper discusses critical ‘distancing’ of Chaucer from orthodox Catholicism, ‘Chaucerian Representation’, p. 16. Thompson explores the careful positioning of An ABC by Speght in his 1602 print of the text as ‘nostalgic […] genteel, pre-Reformation curiosity’. Speght introduced the prayer as a private commission undertaken by Chaucer for Blanche of Lancaster (d. 1368), a suggestion which has chimed well with the desire to position An ABC as an early work, but for which there is, as far as I am aware, no other evidence. Thompson, ‘Patch and Repair’, p. 356. 6 The OPVS project tracked, via a comprehensive examination of surviving manuscripts, the medieval spread and metamorphosis of Deguileville’s text through different reworkings, translations, and literary forms in French, English, German, and Dutch: [accessed 8 May 2017]. Its findings were fed back to the JONAS-IHRT CNRS manuscript database ( [accessed 8 May 2017]). The ‘Pèlerinage’ Allegories, ed. by Nievergelt and Kamath further explores Deguileville’s European transmission and reception contexts, particularly Peters and Kablitz, ‘The Pèlerinage Corpus’. Michael Camille discusses the iconography of different translations of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine in print: ‘Reading the Printed Image’. 7 Phillips argues for critical consideration of An ABC’s contextual placement within the Pèlerinage tradition, ‘The ABC in Context’.

An ABC to t he Virgin

which seeks to categorize translation in terms of a disabling ‘hierarchy of original and copy, with an associated rhetoric of fidelity and error’.8

The Pèlerinage as Contested Text As Ursula Peters has commented, Deguileville’s Pèlerinage ‘unfurls in a variety of textual formats […] from its very beginning the textual history of the Pèlerinage corpus was one of retextualisation’,9 beginning with the text’s explicitly articulated status as a response to the Roman de la rose: En veillant avoie lëu Considere et bien vëu Le biau roumans de la Rose. Bien croi que ce fu la chose Qui plus m’esmut a ce songier Que ci apres vous vueil nuncier. (Vie 1, vv. 9–14)10 (While I was awake, I had read, considered, and carefully looked at the beautiful Roman de la rose. I firmly believe that this was the thing which most moved me to have this dream, which after this I am going to tell you about.) Deguileville’s Pèlerinage is an avowed response to, or reworking of, the Roman de la rose: the first recension of his poem doubles the Rose by claiming it in its opening lines as foundational intertext for this dream-narrative. But his text is then itself doubled by the production of a second authorial recension. Vie 1 was composed c. 1331, and had circulated for approximately twenty-five years before, c. 1355, he substantially reworked it, giving rise to a second verse text, Vie 2, apparently specifically designed to replace or supplant the first.11 Deguileville explores this

8 Rethinking Medieval Translation, ed. by Campbell and Mills, p. 3. 9 Peters, ‘The Pèlerinage-Corpus in the European Middle Ages’, p. 218. 10 All references to Vie 1 from Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine, ed. by Stürzinger, whose text is edited from a single manuscript, BnF, MS fr. 1818. I retain Stürzinger’s emendations in my citations. Huot, ‘Rose’ and its Readers, pp. 207–30; Pomel, ‘Enjeux d’un travail de réécriture’; pp. 464–65, Maupeu, ‘Bivium’; Braet, ‘Les images inaugrales’; and Nievergelt, ‘From disputatio to predicatio’ discuss the Pèlerinage as Rose-intertext, in literary, philosophical, scholastic, and iconographic terms. Kamath and Nievergelt comment upon the ‘spectrum of poetic, moral and epistemological possibilities for later authors working within a growing tradition of first-person narrative allegory’ and the founding place of the Pèlerinage and the Rose within such a spectrum, The ‘Pèlerinage’ Allegories, ed. by Kamath and Nievergelt, pp. 13–14. 11 Together, the two Deguilevillian recensions of the Pèlerinage de vie humaine are extant in at least eighty manuscripts. Manuscripts are listed in Les Pèlerinages allégoriques, ed. by Duval and Pomel, appendix I, supplemented by OPVS [accessed 8 May 2017]: the latter records a total of sixty-eight manuscripts of Vie 1, nine manuscripts of Vie 2, and three hybrid manuscripts which blend Vie 1 and Vie 2 in different ways. Veysseyre surveys readerly approaches to Vie 1 and Vie 2 through analysis of manuscript annotations, ‘Manuscrits à voir, manuscrits à lire’. She outlines

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impulse to rework his own earlier dream-narrative in an added Prologue to Vie 2. This Prologue self-consciously highlights the action of correcting or overwriting a previous authorial textual iteration. Deguileville’s speaker retrospectively describes the 1331 creation of Vie 1, after a dream Lequel ainsi com sommeilleux Escrips a mon esvellement […] Affin que ne l’oubliasse Et que aprés le corrigasse Quant plus esveillié seroye. (vv. 22–27)12 (Which, while I was sleepy, I wrote just as I woke up, so that I would not forget it, and so that I would be able to correct it afterwards, when I was more wide awake). These rough notes of his dream were, however, then taken from him: Sens mon sceü et volenté Tout mon escript me fu osté Par tout divulgué, et scet Dieu Que je ne le tin pas a gieu, Quar a mectrë et a oster, A corrigier et ordonner, Y avoit moult, si com parceu Apres, quant bien esveilliés fu. Or le m’a faillu mendier Aus estrangés et emprunter. Mes tart pour le bien adrecier M’est venu et pour corrigier. En tant de lieus s’est provongné Que jamés n’aroye tracié Ses prouvains […] (vv. 31–45) (Without my knowledge or consent, all my writing was taken, divulged everywhere, and God knows that I don’t find that at all funny, for there was still a lot to put in and take out, a lot to correct and order, as I perceived afterwards, when I was fully awake. I had to beg for it from strangers, and borrow it, but it came back to me too late to really sort it out, and to correct it. It has propagated itself in so many places, that I will never have been able to trace all its offshoots.)

differences in tone and focus between Vie 1 and Vie 2, particularly the latter’s Latinization, at pp. 49–50. Full tabulation and deeper analysis of the differences between Vie 1 and Vie 2 is provided by Maupeu, Pèlerins de vie humaine, chap. 1 and appendix II. 12 All references to Vie 2 from Livre du Pèlerin, ed. by Edwards and Maupeu.

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By acting as posterior corrector or reviser to his own already-circulating text, and by discursively constructing that role within the space of the Vie 2 Prologue, Deguileville performs an action which clearly resonates fruitfully with the contested textuality of the bi-authored Rose. One author once again becomes two, and the narrating ‘I’ of the dream-pilgrimage becomes subject to the now-conflicting claims of both: the already-complex relationships between author, transcriber, narrator, and dreamer are pressurized further by an act of authorial doubling. Vie 1 is retrospectively recast in relation to Vie 2 as a non-authoritative ‘draft’ or illicit ‘offshoot’ which effectively escaped from its author while his back was turned, and has been masquerading as his authoritative text ever since. Such a conceit echoes the doubling up of authors within the Rose whilst simultaneously mirroring back or reversing its direction; whilst the Rose opens as the narrative of Guillaume de Lorris’s dreamer, after a lapse in time appropriated and reworked by Jean de Meun, Deguileville’s first Pèlerinagenarrative is, in Vie 2, retrospectively cast as illicit appropriation, while the reworked text he produces twenty-five years later is lent the mantle of bona fide or ‘corrected’ dream-narrative. The literal truth of Deguileville’s suggestion that his Vie 1 was an unfinished, stolen work appears questionable, to say the least, as is the notion that he genuinely would have waited twenty-five years to retract a text that he allegedly did not ever intend to disseminate in the first place. The Prologue to Vie 2 underlines his interest in highlighting the fact that there were now two separate versions of the same text in circulation — indeed, in exploring the unstoppable potential for texts to proliferate like plants, unchecked — and in directing his readers’ attention to the potential differences in tone and focus between them. Through provocatively rebranding his first Pèlerinage-text as renegade and non-authoritative in the Prologue to his second, Deguileville fostered a kind of textual contest between Vie 1 and Vie 2, which — like the two Roses of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun — stand in a relationship to one another of both friction and complementarity, incompleteness and wholeness, chronological sequence and simultaneity. The existence of three different ‘mixed’ manuscripts which blend Vie 1 and Vie 2 attests to this simultaneity, suggesting a readership which possibly compared, collated, and reworked the two versions into various hybrid texts.13 Deguileville’s two Vies were, like the Rose, to inspire readers and copyists: both versions of the Pèlerinage went on to undergo long traditions of remaniement — whose authors both simulate and supplement Deguileville’s creation of a doubled author-figure — in verse and prose.14

13 These manuscripts are: Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 3170 (c. 1380); BnF, MS fr. 1139 (s.xv); and Manchester, John Rylands Lib., MS fr. 2 (c. 1416). Les Pèlerinages allégoriques, appendix I and the JONAS-IHRT/ CNRS database: PARIS, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 3170 ( [accessed 9 May 2017]); PARIS, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Manuscrits, fr. 01139 ( [accessed 9 May 2017]); and MANCHESTER, John Rylands University Library, fr. 002 ( [accessed 9 May 2017]). 14 French-language remaniements of Vie 1 and Vie 2 are listed by Faral, ‘Guillaume de Digulleville, Jean Galloppes et Pierre Virgin’. They are discussed by Legaré, ‘La réception’ and Le ‘Pèlerinage de la vie humaine’ de la reine Charlotte de Savoie; by Pomel, ‘Enjeux d’un travail de réécriture’; by Camille,

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The particular roles played by The a.b.c. within the narrative structures of Vie 1 and Vie 2 can be read as a core example of Deguileville’s concern with authorial doubling, and its hermeneutic implications. In both versions of the text, The a.b.c. features as a prayer passed into the narrative fully formed and authored by a heavenly force or agency situated outside of the narrator’s consciousness, at a crisis-point in the pilgrim-narrator’s journey.15 In Vie 1, beset by the seven deadly sins and attendant vices, the pilgrim is at the point of collapse, when ‘Grace Dieu’ (the grace of God) hands him the prayer from a heavenly cloud, and with it the means to seek the Virgin’s intercession. Within Vie 2, The a.b.c. — whilst remaining the same textual and lyric unit — is shifted to much later in the narrative framework of the pilgrimage, its place almost always taken by a longer Latin prose prayer attributed to St Bernard, which is recalled to mind by the pilgrim, rather than given by Grace Dieu.16 The pilgrim later finds himself trapped within the ‘mer du Monde’ (sea of the world) when a dove brings him the prayer from Grace Dieu, repetition of which calms the sea and enables his escape. The heavenly nature of the prayer and its privileged role in securing the pilgrim’s salvation are underscored by emphasis on the suddenness of its appearance and its extra-textual completeness in written form; in both Vie 1 and Vie 2 it is described physically entering the narrative: Vie 1: Adonc de la nue.i. escrit Me geta et ainsi me dist: ‘Vois comment prier tu la dois A ce besoing et toute foys Que semblable besoing aras […] Or le li tost apertement Et la requier devotement En li prometant de cuer fin Que tu seras bon pelerin […]’ […] Or vous di que l’escrit ouvri Et le desploiai et le vi. De touz poins fis ma priere En la fourmë et (en la) maniere Que contenoit le dit escrit Et si com Grace l’avoit dit. (vv. 10,871–92)

‘Reading the Printed Image’; and by Peters, ‘Processes of Retextualisation’. 15 Phillips discusses the role of The a.b.c. as turning point in the Pèlerinage’s plot, and analyses its stylistic difference from the narrative which surrounds it, ‘Context’, pp. 3, 6, 10. 16 Inserted after v. 10,978. Phillips, ‘Context’ suggests that an alternative vernacular prayer (O royne de misericorde) replaces The a.b.c. at this point in Vie 2 (p. 4); however, this is not usually the case. O royne appears once in the printed edition of Vie 2 brought out by Berthold Rembolt and Jean Petit c. 1517, but all other known witnesses to Vie 2 (manuscript and print), to my knowledge, contain the Latin prose. I am grateful to Phillipe Maupeu for discussing this point with me.

An ABC to t he Virgin

(Then from the cloud she [Grace Dieu] threw a written text to me, and said this: ‘See how you must pray to her [the Virgin], in this time of need and at all times when you are in similar need. Now, read it openly and beg her devoutly, promising her with a true heart that you will be a good pilgrim’. Now, I tell you that I opened up the written text, unfolded it, and looked at it. In all points I made my prayer in the form and the manner which the said written text contained, and just as Grace had said.) Vie 2: En mon meschief ainsi plaignant Ravoler vi le coulon blanc, Qui un escriptel m’apporta Et puis tantost s’en ravola. Je le desploiai et ouvri, Et quant fut ouvert, tantost vi Que Grace Dieu ens me mandoit Et bien a certes conseilloit Que l’i deïssë humblement En saluant devotement La roÿne de paradis, Laquelle chose tantost fis. (vv. 13,035–46) (In my misery thus complaining, I saw the white dove fly back, who brought me a small written text, then immediately flew off again. I unfolded it and opened it, and, once it was open, I saw that Grace Dieu was addressing me, and certainly advising me that I should say it there humbly, devoutly addressing the queen of paradise, which I immediately did.) The a.b.c.’s embeddedness, or role as text-within-text, is foregrounded in both versions, as emphasis is laid on the Pilgrim’s physical experience of receiving, unfolding, and deciphering the prayer as object (‘escrit’/’escriptel’, ‘ouvri’, ‘desploiai’, ‘vi’; written text, opened, unfolded, saw/looked at) as well as on the implications of its content. Before we hear the pilgrim narrate his recital of the prayer, furthermore, the reader is encouraged to do the same: Vie 2: La forme de l’escript orrés, Et se vostre .a.b.c. savés, Savoir le pourrés de ligier Pour dire le, s’il est mestier. (vv. 13,047–50) (You will hear the form of the written text, and if you know your ABC, you will easily be able to know it, so that you can say it if it is needful.)17 17 The equivalent lines in Vie 1 are virtually identical, and also occur immediately prior to the text of The a.b.c.

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This encouragement renders The a.b.c. a collaborative or shared text via anticipated recitation by its readership: a text which exists and finds its meaning in repetition, located in multiple places and time frames both within and outside the Pèlerinage. Some manuscript illuminations inserted before the text of The a.b.c. is given use this moment to focus attention on the act of textual transmission through verbal recitation. Such images frequently show the pilgrim-narrator kneeling in prayer to the Virgin, or to an enthroned Virgin and child, causing the reader to imagine the process of utterance or recitation before they read the text of the prayer itself, and to imagine themselves in the posture of the pilgrim-narrator before encountering the text of the prayer which they are invited to repeat.18 As Kamath has argued, The a.b.c.’s careful positioning ‘valorises the role of textual creation in salvation, as it invites participation, blending the voices of author, character and reader’.19 This valorization of textual creation as soteriologically effective works to authorize Deguileville’s own project. So, Kamath and Nievergelt draw attention to his ‘ubiquitous use of reified writing within his narratives’, stressing the way in which ‘written objects […] represent communication between earthly and heavenly spheres’. Such representation, they suggest, ‘offer[s] authority and stability to Deguileville’s own poetic participation in this soteriological economy of circulating texts’.20 Illuminations may probe this moment further. For example, within Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 300 (Vie 1; fol. 98r, the cover image of this book) and BnF, MS fr. 1138 (Vie 2; fol. 99v) miniatures illustrate this moment with an image of the Pilgrim not in prayer to the Virgin, but at the very moment in which the escrit containing The a.b.c. enters the poem. Within fr. 1138, the escriptel is still within the beak of the dove, while within the Douce manuscript’s miniature the first line of the prayer — which then follows in full in the text — can be read clearly on the escrit in minute writing. This miniature in particular points up the complex and careful positioning of the prayer within the narrative: it can be read within the miniature before it appears textually transcribed or sequenced into its ‘proper’ narrative place. The Douce miniature gives visual shape to the way in which Deguileville constructs the textual existence of The a.b.c. outside of the temporal and narrative framework of the dream vision, prior to its deployment within that framework, creating in the process a fiction of divine authorship and authority which at once mirrors and underpins his own status as author.21 The role of the prayer as physical, heavenly artefact is foregrounded through its apparent extra-narrative — indeed, pre-narrative — existence. The movement of The a.b.c. into the narrative is dramatized in this

18 Examples include BnF, MSS fr. 825 (Vie 2, fol. 115r), fr. 829 (Vie 2, fol. 104r) or Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 5071 (Vie 1, fol. 69r). 19 Kamath, ‘Deversifying Knowledge’, p. 120, and also Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, pp. 92–93. 20 The ‘Pèlerinage’ Allegories, ed. by Kamath and Nievergelt, pp. 11–12. Pomel explores the resonances of such reified writing with medieval epistolary models and judicial practice, ‘Les écrits pérégrins’. 21 Kamath discusses the way in which Deguileville blends intra-diegetic and extra-diegetic authority here: the prayer is at once intra-diegetically authored by the allegorical personification Grace Dieu, and extra-diegetically authored by Deguileville himself, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, p. 91.

An ABC to t he Virgin

miniature as a moment of contact between earthly and heavenly realms, mirroring the desired intercessory or mediatory role of the Virgin to whom it is addressed. However, Deguileville’s insistence on the written-ness of The a.b.c. and on its transmission as manuscript or folded escrit simultaneously opens it up to the possibility of transmission, and with transmission to error and interpretative debate: it forms an example of what Kamath and Nievergelt describe as Deguileville’s ‘thematization of the fragile and contestable status of the written word’ within the Pèlerinage, which goes hand in hand with his repeated use of embedded texts and documents to explore his own poetic authority.22 Precisely because The a.b.c. circulates in written form, it becomes potentially subject to scribal alteration, to discussion, and to readerly contest. Indeed, as Phillips points out, an act of transcription is implicit in its very appearance copied out in full within the ‘physical book the reader is reading’: the Douce miniature underscores with particular clarity this movement from escrit to transcribed text embedded within a narrative.23 To reproduce The a.b.c.’s written text is both to participate in a soteriological process, and to render that same process problematically or ambiguously open to re-inscription or revision: a fact which Deguileville’s own discussion of the apparently error-strewn transmission of Vie 1 in the Prologue to Vie 2 underscores. The a.b.c. is a text which from the very first finds its meaning in translation — translation into the poem’s narrative, translation between Vie 1 and Vie 2, translation out of the narrative into other times, places, and voices.

Chaucer’s Translation The history of critical engagement with Chaucer’s translation of Deguileville’s a.b.c. has often been teleological in nature: it has focused on establishing precise relationships between source and target terms, structures, and imagery, frequently concluding that Chaucer exceeds or vastly improves upon Deguileville’s prayer, while nonetheless emphasizing the probable earliness (and therefore relative lack of sophistication) of his poem.24 Phillips’s 1993 assessment of the methods of translation employed in An ABC has been crucial in beginning to destabilize this critical framework, particularly as regards the one-way direction of source study from Deguileville’s a.b.c. to Chaucer’s. Building on Crampton’s detailed analysis of An ABC, which focused uniquely on comparing it to Deguileville’s prayer, Phillips demonstrates persuasively that Chaucer’s translation frustrates the notion of like-for-like equivalences with Deguileville’s text, through a translatorly technique which she terms ‘redistribution’. ‘Redistribution’ here describes the shifting of elements and imagery from elsewhere

22 The ‘Pèlerinage’ Allegories, ed. by Nievergelt and Kamath, p. 11. 23 Phillips, ‘Context’, p. 14. 24 Crampton acknowledges these impulses (‘Singular Prayer’, pp. 192, 209). Both she and Phillips, ‘Context’, discuss the critical propensity to date the poem early in Chaucer’s lifetime, in part because of its reputation for derivativeness.

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within the Pèlerinage-narrative into the translation of An ABC. ‘As a result of this approach to translation’, Phillips writes, Chaucer’s ABC gives a more accurate impression of the effect and the significance of the French ABC when the latter is read in its actual context […] as part of the Pèlerinage than we might suppose if we meet the French prayer only in an artificial state.25 Chaucer’s ABC emerges from this discussion as a translation which constructs a temporally blended text: like the illumination in Douce 300, it disrupts the linear chronology of the Pèlerinage ’s narrative structures. It partially frustrates the embeddedness into the narrative of Grace Dieu’s voice as separate or discrete from that of the Pilgrim, parachuted into the poem on a folded slip of paper. It thus responds creatively to the sudden interruption of the escrit within the Pilgrim’s narrative, and the questions about voice, authority, and readerly repetition, transcription or appropriation which Deguileville raises through The a.b.c. Manuscripts of the translated, Middle English ABC respond to its status vis-à-vis the Pèlerinage. Its highly distinctive layout in most manuscript copies — specifically, the decorated initials which are frequently placed at the start of each of its alphabetically ordered stanzas — responds clearly to widespread traditions of presentation associated with the poem as it appears in manuscripts of Deguileville’s work.26 Here, too, decorated initials almost always serve within manuscript copies of Vie 1 and Vie 2 to mark the start of each stanza, their close clustering together lending the prayer a distinct visual identity which sets it apart from the verse which surrounds it, and enhances its formal, rhythmic, and presentational difference from the rest of the Pèlerinage-narrative.27 Indeed, decorated capitals are sometimes used even in the case of manuscripts whose text of The a.b.c. is then disordered or only partial: the visual

25 Phillips, ‘Context’, p. 1. 26 Pace, ‘Adorned Initials’ discusses the decorative tradition of ABC-manuscripts and describes the extant corpus. According to Pace, of the sixteen manuscripts extant, ‘fourteen make some feature of the initials, and […] thirteen have special initials for all the stanzas’, p. 90. Much depends, of course, on what ‘some feature’ and ‘special initials’ signify: the four surviving copies in Cambridge, Magdalen Coll., MS Pepys 2006, Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Fairfax 16, and Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Laud Misc. 740 do not seem to me to employ regular capitals at the start of each stanza which differ substantially in size or decorative quality from other capitals used frequently in the text(s) immediately surrounding An ABC (although all of these manuscripts employ a lavish capital A at the start of the prayer, and MS Laud Misc. 740 additionally supplies it with braces in the inner margin to highlight its particular rhyme scheme and stanzaic layout, fols 103r–106v). In terms of the large, highly visible, decorated (often coloured) initials at the start of each stanza which cause the prayer to stand out as particularly visually distinct, which are characteristic of many French manuscript copies of The a.b.c., and to which I here compare An ABC, I would judge that such initials are present in ten of the sixteen ABCwitnesses. An eleventh (BL, MS Harley 7578) is described by Pace as having spaces three lines tall at the start of each stanza for such letters to be inserted. 27 Many, if not all, manuscripts of the Pèlerinage also employ decorated initials more generally to order the text of the poem; however, these are not usually found elsewhere as regularly or as close together as they are on the a.b.c. folios. These do, therefore, often possess a very different visual quality to the rest of the poem.

An ABC to t he Virgin

traditions associated with ordering and laying out the prayer appear to have formed an important and relatively stable part of creating its particular effect, a part which seems to have been considered integral to its presence within the narrative, even in incomplete form.28 Chaucer’s translation is lent a powerful visual impact by its association with the traditions of presentation found in Deguileville manuscripts.29 Its manuscript layout recalls the impact of Deguileville’s prayer, an impact which underlines its function as escrit, inserted into the Pèlerinage’s narrative framework.

English Translations of Vie 1 and Vie 2 and Chaucer’s Place within Them One strand of the fifteenth-century textual history of Chaucer’s ABC constructs a particular role for the poem, a role in which it functions as a way of probing and deepening ongoing translatorly engagements with Deguileville’s poem. The Pèlerinage was translated twice into English in the early fifteenth century: a prose translation of Vie 1 by an unknown author, and a verse translation of Vie 2, attributed to John Lydgate.30 As is well known, both translations incorporate (or seem to intend to incorporate) Chaucer’s ABC.31 A mobile document or textual object, Chaucer’s translation was, within these traditions, itself repeatedly repurposed by other translators of Deguileville and their scribes, repeatedly reintegrated into the Pèlerinage, as they broached the moment of its insertion and utterance within the text’s two narratives. The Middle English prose Vie 1 survives in six manuscripts, and all six transmit Chaucer’s ABC, rather than an independently translated version, as the prayer the pilgrim is handed by Grace Dieu: ‘Loo heere how þow shuldest preye hire, boþe at þis neede and alwey whan þou shalt haue semblable neede […]’ Now I telle yow þe scripture I vndide, and vnplytede it, and redde it, and maade at alle poyntes my preyeere in þe foorme and in þe maneere þat þe same scripture conteenede, and as Grace hadde seyd it. Þe foorme of þe scripture ye shule heere. If ‘A . B. C.’ wel ye kunne, wite it ye mown lightliche, for to sey it if it be neede. (ll. 5821–32, An ABC at ll. 5834–6017)

28 As in the example of Paris, Bib. de l’Arsenal, MS 3170 (Vie 1 and Vie 2 hybrid), fol. 54v, which transmits a truncated ABC-text out of alphabetical order. Edwards and Maupeu comment on the complex and vexed transmission tradition of The a.b.c., Guillaume de Deguileville, Livre du Pèlerin, ed. and trans. by Edwards and Maupeu, pp. 20, 954. This tradition, they argue, hints at the prayer’s independent circulation outside, as well as within, the Pèlerinage’s particular narrative context. 29 Crampton and Pace both note the importance of the decorated initials, particularly Lombardic capitals, within liturgical manuscripts: these provide a powerful, shared visual intertext for the decorated capitals of An ABC where they appear in both Chaucer and Deguileville manuscripts. Crampton, ‘Singular Prayer’, p. 193, and Pace, ‘Adorned Initials’, pp. 89–90. 30 Vie 1: Þe pilgrimage of þe lyfe of þe manhode, ed. by Henry. Vie 2: John Lydgate, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. by Furnivall and Locock. 31 ‘Seem to intend’ because no surviving manuscript of the Vie 2 translation actually does incorporate the poem, although there are clear references to its presence within the text, which are discussed by Thompson, ‘Chaucer’s An ABC in and out of Context’ and ‘Patch and Repair’.

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All manuscripts of the prose Vie 1 with the exception of Laud Misc. 740 present the poem with some form of decorated or otherwise distinctive capital letters for each separate stanza. In some manuscripts, this decoration is particularly pronounced: Pace describes, for example, how each one of the ‘blue Lombardic initials infilled with red acanthus forms’ which structure An ABC in the prose Vie 1 found in Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 239 (U.3.12) are ‘linked by conjoined red penwork sprays extending to occupy the left margin from top to bottom’.32 Laud Misc. 740’s copy, despite only providing a decorated initial for the opening ‘A’ of An ABC, nonetheless gives this initial a marginal spray which extends the length of the folio’s border, a division habitually used to organize the text into larger segments (fol. 103v). Melbourne (Australia), State Library of Victoria, MS *096 G94 inserts a miniature prior to An ABC, in addition to using ‘blue and red penwork’ to mark each initial.33 The miniature shows the Pilgrim-narrator in prayer, situated between the Virgin and Grace Dieu, and it, too, echoes the content and placement of many of the illuminations accompanying The a.b.c.’s insertion and utterance within Deguileville manuscripts.34 The use of decorated letters for each stanza of An ABC — and, in the case of the Melbourne manuscript, an illumination showing the prayer in the act of being uttered — in these manuscripts of the prose Vie 1 separate An ABC visually from its surrounding text in a way which connects the moment of its insertion into the translation back to the strong traditions of similarly distinctive decorative presentation found within Pèlerinage manuscripts. Intriguingly, this kind of decoration is also used within copies of Chaucer’s translation which are transmitted outside of the translation of the Pèlerinage. The textual history of Chaucer’s ABC splits into two branches: the so-called beta group of manuscripts, comprising those which transmit the text as part of the translated Middle English prose Vie 1,35 and the alpha group, in which An ABC features as a stand-alone text, often transmitted in anthology manuscripts (for example, Bodley 638 and Fairfax 16, two of the ‘Oxford Group’, contain An ABC). Of these alpha, stand-alone texts, most treat the layout and decoration of An ABC in a similar way, marking it out as distinctive through decorated capital letters at the start of each stanza or other features of mise-en-page. As Pace notes, in the case of some of these manuscripts, An ABC is the only text in the codex to possess this particular form, and/or sustained degree, of decoration.36 The alpha tradition, whose members 32 Pace, ‘Adorned Initials’, p. 94. 33 Pace, ‘Adorned Initials’, p. 98. 34 Henry, ‘The Illuminations’, p. 271. An ABC is introduced by a rubric in this manuscript at fol. 74v: ‘How þe pilgrime makes his prayer vn to our lady Seynte Mary. and seys in þis wise’. 35 The only beta manuscript of An ABC which does not incorporate it into the prose Vie 1 is BL, MS Add. 36983, a copy of the Cursor Mundi which includes the poem. Thompson discusses this manuscript and its contents: ‘Textual Instability’ and ‘Chaucer’s An ABC in and out of Context’, p. 40. 36 Pace, ‘Adorned Initials’, p. 96 (on Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Bodley 638) and p. 91 for a facsimile of An ABC’s opening folio in this manuscript. Cambridge, UL, MS Gg. 4. 27 gives An ABC a demivinet border, fols 5r–7v. For the decoration of the copy of An ABC within Coventry, City Rec. Off., MS Accession 325/1, also highly unusual in the context of the rest of this manuscript, see Doyle and Pace, ‘A New Chaucer Manuscript’, p. 26 and Pace, ‘Adorned Initials’, pp. 97–98.

An ABC to t he Virgin

transmit three of the four extant contemporary attributions of the poem to Chaucer in headnotes or rubrics,37 nonetheless retains its decorative link to the Pèlerinage, a link which encodes its status as escritel, pre-written text. An ABC is embedded inside Deguileville’s poem even as it is also outside of it, reiterated in other times and places. I noted above that, out of four extant attributions to Chaucer, three are alpha texts. None of the beta manuscripts — i.e. those which contain the Middle English prose Vie 1 translation — attribute their copy of An ABC to Chaucer as part of their original design or rubrics. However, one such manuscript has been annotated in its right-hand margin by the start of An ABC with a contemporary attribution, probably not in the hand of its scribe, but by another reader: ‘nota Chauc[er]’ (London, Lambeth Palace (olim Sion College), MS Arc.L40.2/E.44, fol. 79r; see fig. 2).38 Chaucer is both absent and present: absent within the original layout of the book, whose designer did not plan for a rubric or gloss to include his name,39 but an added, unlooked-for presence within its margins. His appearance here may seem not to merit much discussion; however, Prendergast, following Strohm, has underlined the importance of teasing out nuances in individual reader responses: ‘individual acts of […] localized […] reinterpretation examine [and challenge] totalizing views of the Middle Ages’. Such details ‘require us to rethink how we impose our idea of Chaucer on an audience that is temporally and geographically other’.40 It is worth asking, then, to what readerly impulse does this note attest? How might we interpret what is itself evidence of (some kind of) interpretation? Does it simply remind a reader of Chaucer’s presence for its own sake? Does it function 37 Coventry, City Rec. Off., MS Accession 325/1: ‘Here biginneth a preiour of our ladie þat Geffreie Chaucer made affter the ordre of The a.b.c.’, fol. 75r. Cambridge, Magdalen Coll., MS Pepys 2006: ‘Pryer A nostre Dame […] par Chaucer’, p. 88; ‘a Prier a nostre Dame […] par Chaucer’, p. 386. The manuscript is paginated (rather than foliated). For Coventry’s rubric, I use the transcription by Pace in Doyle and Pace, ‘A New Chaucer Manuscript’, p. 26. 38 Opinion has differed as to the identification of the hand which has copied ‘nota Chauc[er]’ into the margin of the Sion manuscript at the point at which An ABC begins. This manuscript’s scribe is John Shirley, and both Brusendorff (The Chaucer Tradition, p. 238) and Furnivall (Odd Texts of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, pp. 65–66) attribute this gloss to him, along with the words ‘Devotissima oratio [ad] Mariam. pro omni ten[tatione et] tribulacione necess[aria] angustie’, which also appear in the same margin. (The gloss is partially lost where the manuscript’s folios have been trimmed; I use Avril Henry’s reconstruction.) Henry more recently examined the manuscript and concluded that the ‘nota Chauc[er]’ is not in Shirley’s hand, nor his ink, although the rest of the marginal gloss is, Þe pilgrimage, ed. by Henry, i, 323. Connolly, on the other hand, implies that Shirley did copy the attribution to Chaucer (John Shirley, p. 85 and n. 36). Having examined the manuscript myself, I am in agreement with Henry. For a full description of the manuscript, see Þe Pilgrimage, ed. by Henry, i, pp. xlvii–xlix. 39 A Latin incipit, carefully spaced in the centre of the writing column, introduces An ABC in the Sion manuscript: ‘incipit carmen secundum ordinem litterarum alphabeti’: this incipit also introduces the prayer in Cambridge, UL, MS Ff.5.30’s copy of the prose Vie 1, and in BL, MS Add. 36983’s copy of the Cursor Mundi+ABC. In addition to the incipit, running headers also mark out the prayer in the top margins of the Sion manuscript: ‘Devoute dytee of oure Ladye’ (fol. 79r); ‘A devoute Dytee Of oure Ladye Marye’ (fols 79v–80r); ‘A devoute thing To oure Ladye’ (fols 80v–81r); ‘A devoute prayer to oure lady’ (fol. 81v). 40 Prendergast, ‘Writing, Authenticity’, p. 4. Prendergast draws on Strohm, ‘Chaucer’s Fifteenth-Century Audience’.

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as evidence of a fifteenth-century reader who is more interested in Chaucer than in the surrounding material, keen to single out ‘Chaucer’s’ words from ‘the rest of the text’? Or, might we read it somewhat differently, as a deliberate act to flag up the way in which the translated Pèlerinage, too, has ‘moved in’ a text from outside of its narrative, a text by a different translator, to stage the moment at which Grace Dieu delivers the escrit to the Pilgrim? The Sion manuscript exhibits an interest in the multiple voices which are compiled in the Pèlerinage, and in the way in which they are woven together. For example, John Shirley, its scribe, almost always underlines the proper names of characters and persons (both from within the narrative and without) who are speaking, listening, or referred to as exempla by those speaking, an effect which blurs the distinction between the intradiegetic voice of a character within the dream vision, and the extra-diegetic voices of auctores or exempla from (for example) the Bible on whom that character draws. So, on fol. 44r, the characters ‘Raysoun’ (who is speaking), ‘Gracedieux’, ‘Nabal’, ‘Pharoo’, ‘Ruedentendement’, and ‘Salomon’ are all underlined in an identical fashion, aligning Deguileville’s allegorical characters with the biblical voices whom they cite, and lending them the same ontological status.41 Similarly, Shirley occasionally uses marginal glosses to highlight embedded extra-diegetic narratives which are told as exempla, as well as to trace dialogue between debating protagonists and to insert his own voice into the manuscript.42 There is slippage between intra- and extra-diegetic voices, too, within the chapter headings which divide the text in this manuscript: in one heading on fol. 1v, the reader is invited, as if by Shirley, an anonymous commentator, or even the author himself to ‘Beholde howe. þe pilgryme’ addresses ‘dame Gracedieux’. By fol. 2v, however, ‘he’ has become ‘I’: ‘Loo nowe how þat I aqueynted me with þe fayre Lady Grace Dieux and cryed hir mercy’. Placing the Chaucer gloss alongside these features gives us greater purchase on how it might be functioning in this copy of the prose Vie 1, suggesting a focus on Chaucer as one voice among many. This reading situates Chaucer’s marginal presence in the gloss as an alert response to the multivocality of the Pèlerinage, and to the way in which its prose translator has dealt with that multivocality in this particular narrative episode: a translation is embedded — indeed, translated — into a translation in order to deepen the effect of the moment within the narrative at which a text is embedded within a text. We might compare this to the insertion, unique to the Melbourne manuscript, of a second verse prayer at a later point into the prose Vie 1. This prayer, whose entrance into the narrative at the hands of Grace Dieu on a ‘litill roule writyne […] with golde letters’, from which the Pilgrim-narrator then recites it, is described in strikingly similar terms to An ABC.43 As Kamath 41 See Þe Pilgrimage, ed. by Henry, i, 73–74 and ii, notes to ll. 3037–38 and 3056 for this moment, at which Reason dispenses with Rude Entendement’s arguments and leads the Pilgrim on. 42 The embedded narrative at fol. 68v, for example, is glossed ‘[Behol]de þe taale’ in the left-hand margin, while the debate between Nature and Grace Dieu at fols 12r–13v is also traced through a series of marginal glosses, as well as through the manuscript’s rubrics, which are always integrated into the writing space. The words ‘nota per Shirley’ appear as marginal glosses at e.g. fols 4r and 5r. 43 Þe pilgrimage, ed. by Henry, ii: appendix, p. 585.

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Figure 2. Þe pilgrimage of þe lyfe of þe manhode, London, Lambeth Palace (olim Sion College), MS Arc.L40.2/E.44, fol. 79r, detail. By permission of Lambeth Palace Library.

has noted, it forms an inventive response to the Pèlerinage’s ‘inclusion of voices beyond the textual frame’.44 The Sion manuscript’s ‘nota Chauc[er]’ likewise draws attention to this inclusion. What Phillips has termed the ‘physicality and externality’ of The a.b.c. within Deguileville’s narrative are underlined through the marginal attribution to Chaucer,45 and Chaucer’s translating voice speaks from the margin, becoming for a moment superimposed explicitly upon the embedded voice of Grace Dieu.

Vie 2 Verse Translation If Chaucer’s ABC functions within the prose Vie 1 as a response to Deguileville’s thematization of authorship as circulating textuality, it plays a rather different role within the Middle English verse translation of Vie 2. Yet, in this case too, its (non) appearance constructs Chaucer as simultaneously absent and present, simultaneously marginal and central. The Vie 2 is thought to have been translated by Lydgate, and is now extant in only three manuscripts, all of which are in some way incomplete, and a fragment.46 It was commissioned by Thomas Montagu, earl of Salisbury, in the year

44 Kamath, ‘Deversifying Knowledge’, p. 123. 45 Phillips, ‘Context’, p. 15. 46 BL, MSS Cotton Vitellius C XIII, Cotton Tiberius A VII, and Stowe 952 are the three manuscript copies. Stowe 952 was left unfinished and later completed by John Stow from another, now-lost text of the poem. Worcester, Cathedral Chapter Library and Archive MS C. 01. 08 contains a fragment of the poem within its binding: see JONAS-IRHT/CNRS database, section romane, ‘Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, John Lydgate’ [accessed 25 May 2018].

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1426.47 A possible commemorative presentation frontispiece,48 in brown penwork and brown tint and depicting the translation’s presentation to its commissioner, survives in BL, MS Harley 4826 (see pl. 6). (This is, however, not a manuscript of the text: the single leaf bearing the image, fol. 1*r, has been added to this codex.) The image depicts Salisbury in armour being presented with the book by a kneeling pilgrim figure and a monk. Scott highlights as particularly distinctive the image’s ‘depiction of a character from the text making the presentation [i.e. the Pilgrim] while the author or translator [the monk] looks on’.49 When one looks closely, however, it becomes apparent that the monk does more than ‘look on’ in this image. The Pilgrim hands the book upwards to Salisbury with his right hand (the side nearest the reader), but his left grasps his staff. The hand holding the other side of the bound manuscript book in the image is in fact the hand of the monk figure, reaching across with his left hand, his thumb just visible along the top of the codex, and his right hand in the folds of his habit by his side. The book is conjointly presented by two figures, figures whose identity is, moreover, not entirely fixed. The presence of Deguileville can be read in the image within both kneeling figures: as author-monk, shaping his dream into words, and first-person narrating Pilgrim: the placement of a right hand and a left hand on either side of the book serve almost to mesh the two figures into one individual. The image of the monk meanwhile, may accommodate both author and translator, Deguileville and Lydgate, simultaneously.50 The figure of the Pilgrim, too, may be identified with the text’s readership as well as with the text’s narrating character: through the copying and dissemination of the text, its body of readers — including Salisbury himself — are also positioned in the place of the Pilgrim, particularly in those moments when, as in the case of The a.b.c., they are invited within the text to repeat or speak aloud the Pilgrim’s (and/or Grace Dieu’s, and/or the author’s) words.51 In this respect, the interpretative concerns raised by the image might be compared to the presentation strategies found in manuscripts of the Pèlerinage and

47 For the date and identity of the commissioner, see The Pilgrimage, ed. by Furnivall and Locock, Translator’s Prologue, ll. 114–61. The attribution to Lydgate is supported by a surviving entry within a booklist belonging to Alice Chaucer, Salisbury’s wife (later widow), now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ewelme muniments (VII.A.47 [3]). The entry reads: ‘a boke of English in papir of þe pilgrymage translated by daune John lydgate out of frensh couered with blak lether withowte bordes’. It is transcribed and discussed by Meale, ‘Reading Women’s Culture’, p. 86. 48 The suggestion that this is a commemorative image is Kathleen Scott’s: Salisbury was killed at the siege of Orléans in 1428, and the presentation manuscript may not have been ready in time, given that the translation was only begun in 1426. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, pp. 305–07 (no. 111). 49 Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, p. 305. 50 Because the image is not in full colour, the monk’s tunic and cloak cannot be definitively distinguished as either Cistercian (Deguileville’s order) or Benedictine (Lydgate’s). 51 Kamath discusses this negotiation between the voices of author, translator, and narrator-protagonist in relation to manuscript rubrics of the translator’s Prologue opening Lydgate’s Vie 2: ‘the sequence of English rubrics applied to the first-person discourse at the opening of the Pilgrimage suggests that the relation between the translator and the author deserves as much consideration, even interpretation, as the relation between the author and the allegory’s narrator-protagonist’, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, p. 147.

An ABC to t he Virgin

Vie 1’s Middle English prose translation which we have already considered, despite the fact that none of these manuscripts feature an analogous image. Lydgate sharpens readerly awareness of the superimposed voices of author, characters, and translator in a passage added to his Vie 2 just before the Pilgrim is given the prayer. This passage introduces the soon-(not)-to-be read ABC-text as that of Chaucer: And touchynge the translacioun Off thys noble Orysoun Whylom (yiff I shal nat feyne) The noble poete off Breteyne, My mayster Chaucer, in his tyme, Affter the Frenche he dyde yt ryme, Word by word, as in substaunce, Ryght as yt ys ymad in Fraunce, fful devoutly, in sentence, In worshepe and in reuerence Off that noble hevenly quene, Both moder and maydë clene. […] And ffor memorye off that poete, Wyth al hys rethorykës swete, That was ffyrste in any age That amendede our langage; Therfore, as I am bounde off dette, In thys book I wyl hym sette, And ympen thys Oryson Affter hys translacïon, My purpos to determyne, That yt shal enlwmyne Thys lytyl book, Rud off making, Wyth som clause off hys wrytyng. And as he made thys Orysoun Off ful devout entencïoun, And by maner off a prayere, Ryht so I wyl yt settyn here. (verse Vie 2, ll. 19,751–19,788) Lydgate here abruptly discontinues the first-person narration of Deguileville’s dreamer, and speaks as translator, a radical break in narrating voice which works to emphasize the alterity of the ABC as a textual unit, but which also ruptures the allegorical and narrative framework of Deguileville’s poem. In Lydgate’s translation, the fiction that An ABC is authored and sent to the Pilgrim by the personification Grace Dieu is suddenly compromised and firmly rewritten: narratively speaking, after Lydgate’s lengthy translatorly interjection, the Pilgrim’s description of An ABC’s origins with a character within the poem’s allegorical framework can no longer fully hold. Instead, the extra-diegetic status of An ABC as authored by Deguileville but subject to copying, circulation, repetition, and transformation outside of the narrative is foregrounded. Chaucer’s translation is figured

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as an undertaking which blends hermeneutic with devotional activity (‘fful devoutly, in sentence, | In worship, and in reverence’): the act of translating the prayer ‘word by word, as in substaunce’ is aligned with the devotional act of repeating it. As Kamath points out, Lydgate rhetorically unites himself and Chaucer here in ‘salvific accretion’ of iterations of the prayer through translation, repetition, and transcription: like the readers envisaged by Deguileville, both ‘repeat’ the prayer outside of its temporal and narrative moment,52 and both repetitions resonate with the transmission history of the Pèlerinage itself. Lydgate’s suggestion that he will ‘ympen thys Oryson’ particularly underlines this. Meaning ‘to graft’, the verb ‘ympen’ recalls closely Deguileville’s own horticultural imagery, applied to the seamless blending of authoritative and non-authoritative text in manuscript transmission, which he uses in Vie 2’s Prologue to describe the illicit circulation of Vie 1: ‘En tant de lieus s’est provongné | Que jamés n’aroye tracié | Ses prouvains (It has propagated itself in so many places that I will never have been able to trace all of its offshoots, vv. 43–45). Deguileville uses very similar horticultural imagery later in Vie 2 during an interpolation in which the character Venus describes the particular activity of Jean de Meun within his portion of the Rose:53 Il n’y a fors de moi parlé, Ce tant seulement excepté Que mon clerc escrivain embla Et en estranges champs soia ; De quoi maintes gens ont cuidié Que en sa terre l’eust soié, […] Mes pas ne fu tant esbaÿ Que le larrecin ne l’aportast Et en mon roman ne l’entast, Laquel chose moult me desplut. (Vie 2, vv. 8735–55) (It [the Rose] is entirely about me; that is, excepting the material which my clerk-scribe [i.e. Jean de Meun] stole and harvested from others’ fields, about which many people thought that he had harvested from his own land. […] But he was not so frightened that he did not bring his stolen loot with him and graft it into my roman, which greatly displeased me). For the passage describing how stolen plant-texts were grafted into the Rose by Jean de Meun, Lydgate gives the following: But boldëly, or I was war, fforth with hym hys stelthe he bar, Ympyd it in / in my romaunce, Wych was to me gret dysplesaunce. (verse Vie 2, ll. 13,251–54)

52 Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, p. 150 n. 23. 53 Maupeu and Edwards discuss Deguileville’s approach to the Rose here: Livre du Pèlerin, ed. by Maupeu and Edwards, pp. 653–55 and also Maupeu, ‘Bivium’.

An ABC to t he Virgin

The verb ‘ympen’, here chosen to translate Deguileville’s ‘enter’ (to graft, v. 8754) and designating Jean de Meun’s strategies of self-authorization through compilation within the Rose, is the very same term which Lydgate uses about his own interpolation into the Vie 2 of Chaucer’s ABC. The reuse of this term at the moment at which he introduces An ABC into his text perhaps associates Lydgate not so much with Chaucer as with Jean de Meun: Lydgate presents himself as translator constructing and shaping his own authoritative position through incorporation of others’ voices, including his own.54 The vocabulary which Lydgate uses to refer to Chaucer and An ABC at this point clearly positions Chaucer in his accustomed, critically familiar role as ‘noble […] mayster’ to Lydgate’s subordinate poetic apprentice or heir. John J. Thompson, indeed, has highlighted the way in which Lydgate constructs and capitalizes on Chaucer’s literary reputation to enhance the prestige of his own translation. However, in so doing, as Thompson notes, ‘the devil is always in the detail’. Lydgate also fixes Chaucer firmly in the past, the forever ‘dead and absent’ provider of textual material which Lydgate now reconfigures and manipulates.55 Chaucer, whilst being the recipient of Lydgate’s fulsome praise and admiration simultaneously appears boxed into an almost ornamental role. Two verbs merit close attention here: ‘enlwmynen’ and ‘setten’. Although the term ‘enlwmynen’ can signify to metaphorically ‘enlighten’ something or someone with knowledge or faith, as well as an act of rhetorical or verbal embellishment, it also refers to the art of manuscript decoration.56 Indeed, Lydgate here echoes and reconfigures an image used by Chaucer within An ABC: Kalenderes enlumyned ben thei That in this world ben lighted with thi name, And whoso goth to yow the righte wey, Him thar not drede in soule to be lame. (ll. 73–76)57 54 Kamath explores the use of rubrication in manuscripts of Lydgate’s Vie 2 to highlight ‘the translator’s ability to offer interpretative commentary’ which is inserted into the text, and discusses the ways in which this rubrication ‘visually allies the translator with the other authorities cited in the text’s margin’ such as Chrysostom. Kamath, ‘Periphery and Purpose’, pp. 39, 42–43. Perry has proposed the concept of the ‘virtual coterie’, which spans time and space and incorporates living and dead voices, and which he sees constructed by fifteenth-century scribes and authors (including Lydgate, and John Shirley, scribe of the Sion manuscript) as a way of shaping and articulating distinctive roles in literary and textual production, and the construction of their own poetic authority: ‘The Earl of Suffolk’s French Poems’, p. 299. 55 Thompson, ‘After Chaucer’, pp. 186, 194. Simpson discusses a similar moment within Lydgate’s Life of our Lady, at which he simultaneously rhetorically constructs Chaucer’s centrality in spite of his death, and distances him as dead and gone, ‘Chaucer’s Presence and Absence’, pp. 260–61. Barr powerfully destabilizes the universality of the ‘weight of tradition that teaches us to see the sage hand of the Father of English Poetry’ in fifteenth-century marginal images of Chaucer’s pointing hand in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes and The Canterbury Tales, arguing that ‘the significance of Chaucer’s little text hands exceeds any attempt to pin them into a stable discursive formation’, Transporting Chaucer, pp. 112–16, cited at pp. 114 and 116. 56 MED enluminen, v., senses 1, 2, and 3. 57 I cite from Riverside. At the start of this, the K stanza, Deguileville’s syntax is easier to decode than Chaucer’s version: ‘Kalendier sont enluminé | Et autre livre enteriné | Quant ton nom les enlumine’ (Kalenders are illuminated, and other books made perfect, when your name illuminates them), Livre du pèlerin, ed. by Edwards and Maupeu, vv. 13,159–61.

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This image, too, plays on the relationship between spiritual ‘illumination’, in the sense that the Virgin bestows light and hope upon those who petition her and devote themselves to her, the decorative illumination of liturgical books, such as litanies, which lend physical ‘light’ to appearances of the Virgin’s name, and possibly even the conferring of a kind of quasi-liturgical salvific power upon all texts which invoke her name, and are therefore themselves ‘illuminated’ like liturgical books through its inclusion.58 Through use of the verb ‘enlwmynen’, Lydgate presents An ABC as a text which adds ornamental value and spiritual efficacy to his own Vie 2 translation, but also a text which, in its material form, functions like an illumination: something inserted into the manuscript which intermediates part of its textual content.59 Barr’s distinction between the act of reflecting back (‘illustrations of ’) and the act of embedding interpretative comment (‘realisation of […] responses’, my emphasis) suggests that the act of ‘enlwmyn-ing’ may possess a hermeneutic thrust which resonates with the practice of translation. Chaucer’s ABC is employed as an interpretative response to the process of translation: a text which ‘translates’ that of Lydgate as it translates Deguileville. The verb ‘setten’, too, shares textual and artistic connotations. The phrase ‘setten in book’, is attested several times in the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse;60 however, ‘setten’ can also be used to refer to the positioning of a gemstone in metalwork.61 The verb is used twice in quick succession to discuss both the text of An ABC (‘yt’ will be ‘settyn here’) and Chaucer himself who will simultaneously be ‘sette […] in this book’, fixed in Lydgate’s text, apparently central to it and to its value, but also (to quote Kamath) ‘enshrin[ed]’ within it.62 This moment both gestures towards continued circulation of Chaucer’s poetic voice and silences him in death. In some respects, it bears comparison with the image of Alain Chartier’s tomb constructed slightly later in the fifteenth century by Achille Caulier in the Ospital d’amour. As we saw in Chapter 4, Caulier here embedded Chartier’s (dead) body inside the image of an ornate tomb within his own poem, a tomb which was adorned with verses celebrating Chartier’s poetic and rhetorical artistry. This placed Chartier in a complex position: extra-diegetically auctor of, but also intra-diegetically fictionalized by Caulier’s poetic voice, his disintegrating bones commingling not with those of other authors, but with their characters and narratives. Writing of the illustration

58 This last reading understands the subject of the first two lines of this stanza to be ‘thei’: ‘Those [unspecified things — people? Books?] which in this world are lit up with your name are illuminated kalenders’. Alternatively, one could consider the ‘thei’ as redundant: ‘Kalenders are illuminated, which in this world are lit up with your name’. Henry comments on the difficulty of construing these lines syntactically, Þe pilgrimage, ed. by Henry, ii, 487 (note to l. 5906). 59 The verb ‘to intermediate’ is developed and discussed by Barr in relation to illustrations in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. Barr conceives of these manuscript illuminations as ‘visual texts’ to be read, rather than ‘visual illustrations of text’: the ‘realisation of available responses to text both from the place where that illustration appears and from textual and cultural knowledge further afield’. Transporting Chaucer, pp. 82, 122 n. 2. 60 CMEPV: proximity search ‘sett*’ and ‘book’. MED setten, v., sense 30a. 61 MED setten, v., sense 12. 62 Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory, p. 153.

An ABC to t he Virgin

of Chaucer, his left hand pointing to ‘empty space’ in the margin of fol. 153v of the Ellesmere Canterbury Tales, Barr describes how the hand of Chaucer [here] is the hand of a fictional character that Chaucer the poet wrote into being. Chaucer’s creation points to a tale that he is about to deliver orally that has been written by Chaucer the poet and which an illustrator visualised on the Ellesmere page. Chaucer’s hand unsettles the roles of author, character, illustrator and scribe.63 Lydgate’s discussion and would-be integration of Chaucer’s ABC into his Vie 2 translation ‘unsettles’ these roles too, in a slightly different way. It functions rather like Caulier’s description of Chartier’s tomb: it constructs an image of Chaucer as illumination which serves to enmesh the transcribed words of Chaucer the translator’s ABC (‘yt’) with Chaucer the poet’s body (‘hym’), both objects of the verb ‘setten’. In so doing, it places Chaucer as both extra-diegetic, auctorial precursor to, but, equally, intra-diegetic character or subjected presence within, Lydgate’s text. With this in mind, the ‘institutionalised blank space’ and ‘unnatural vacuum’ which stands in the place of Chaucer’s ABC in both the extant manuscripts which preserve this section of the poem pose a particular challenge to the reader.64 For neither manuscript in fact includes Chaucer’s poem where it is apparently ‘meant’ to appear: in both texts, Lydgate’s extended translatorly interpolation is followed not by An ABC but by a large, unexplained gap.65 These gaps bespeak exemplars which, presumably, did not contain An ABC either. The scribal decisions to leave a space suggests the intention to fill that space later, or at least the acknowledgement that something is missing; however, in neither case was the later incorporation of An ABC apparently prioritized, either by the scribe of the Vitellius manuscript, or by the scribe of the manuscript Stow copies. Stow inserted guide initials in the space where each decorated letter of the alphabet would appear on the relevant folios of Stowe 952 — suggesting that he was well aware of An ABC’s usual manuscript layout — but never copied in the text itself.66 The Vitellius scribe, on the other hand, not only left the space completely blank, but also underestimated the size of gap which would be required, leaving only fol. 257v and a third of fol. 257r, which equates in this manuscript to around fifty lines (see fig. 3).67 Whether deliberate or an accident

63 Barr, Transporting Chaucer, p. 109. 64 Thompson, ‘After Chaucer’, pp. 197, 195. 65 The relevant manuscripts are Cotton Vitellius C XIII (fol. 257r–v) and Stowe 952 (fols 329v–330r). The fifteenth-century part of Stowe 952 breaks off at fol. 303v, so the ABC episode is found in the section of the manuscript copied by Stow. Cotton Tiberius A VII is missing this episode entirely. 66 Thompson discusses manuscripts containing An ABC seen by Stow, from which he could have copied An ABC into his Vie 2, had he wished to, ‘After Chaucer’, pp. 195–96. It does not seem possible to clearly determine whether Stow replicated the size of the gap (presumably) left in his exemplar, and possibly even the letters for the start of each stanza, or whether he brought his own knowledge of the layout and length of An ABC to bear whilst copying Stowe 952. 67 It is, however, just possible that the gap could originally have been larger by one or more folios: Vitellius C XIII is very damaged, and its vellum pages are now individually mounted and preserved on contemporary paper, so that the original quiring is sometimes difficult to discern. The scribe

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of manuscript transmission, Lydgate’s translator’s build-up to the incorporation of Chaucer’s poem is frustrated or undercut by that poem’s unexpected absence. For all that the translator’s voice apparently intends to ‘sette’ Chaucer firmly in his place within the book, Chaucer has eluded him. Or, perhaps, the translator has eluded Chaucer. On fol. 299r–v of BL, MS Stowe 952 — in the part of the manuscript which was copied by the fifteenth-century scribe, not Stow — we find a new verse prayer to the Virgin, inserted into Deguileville’s text by Lydgate, uttered in the voice of the Pilgrim.68 This prayer, beginning ‘O blyssed mayde, fflour off alle goodnesse’ utilizes the same eight-line verse form and rhyme scheme as both Deguileville and Chaucer’s ABCs. Its decasyllabic metre also mimics that used by Chaucer: formally, it echoes exactly Chaucer’s translation of Deguileville’s prayer. Its position within the Pèlerinage’s narrative is complex: it occurs in the midst of Lydgate’s translation into English prose of the lengthy Latin prose prayer or meditation on the teachings of St Bernard which, in Vie 2, displaces An ABC from the position in which it is found in Vie 1 to later in the narrative.69 This Latin text, we recall, is introduced by the Vie 2 Pilgrim as something he remembers (in Lydgate’s words, ‘yt ffel / In my Remembrance’, l. 16,254) and Lydgate’s interpolation is (to employ his own term) ‘ympyd’ seamlessly into it, an act which silently blends his own authorial composition with the memory of the Pilgrim-narrator. Because of this, the new prayer is framed both intra- and extra-diegetically as existing prior to Chaucer’s ABC: intra-diegetically because it is presented as part of the Pilgrim’s memory, and extra-diegetically because it is presented as part of the Deguilevillian Pèlerinage-text which Lydgate is translating. Its careful positioning here neatly reverses the chronology of the two English Marian prayers, Chaucer’s and Lydgate’s. In its close mirroring of the formal features of Chaucer’s ABC, it could be read as a complementary echo of Chaucer… but, it is positioned first within the narrative, setting up Chaucer’s text as the mirror image, the echo — or, even, the translation, of Lydgate’s. *** The complex transmission and transformation history of The a.b.c. and its counterpart, An ABC — in, out, and back into the Pèlerinage, a stand-alone text in a range of English anthology manuscripts, back into the Pèlerinage-tradition in the prose Vie 1 translation, almost (but not quite) integrated into the verse Vie 2 translation, where its (non)appearance is pre-emptively doubled by a new prayer inserted by Lydgate — charts a non-linear trajectory which is illuminating, in terms of the ways we have seen translation function in this book. It resists strict chronological or completely sequential source study — ‘so often a kind of reading which stabilises an earlier text

habitually uses twelve folios to a quire, and the ABC quire (as established from the position of its catchword on fol. 262v) currently only contains its last nine consecutive (?) folios, in the midst of which are found the ABC section of the text. However, there is material missing from the manuscript directly before the ABC quire, suggesting that the leaves that were lost were probably from the front of the quire, not the middle, and we probably have not lost a blank leaf or leaves from the ABC-gap. 68 DIMEV 3846. DIMEV records no other occurrences of this prayer outside of Lydgate’s Vie 2 translation. 69 For this portion of the verse Vie 2, see The Pilgrimage, ed. by Furnivall and Locock, ll. 16,275–17,033.

An ABC to t he Virgin

Figure 3. The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, London, BL, MS Cotton Vitellius C XIII, fol. 257r. © The British Library Board, MS Cotton Vitellius C XIII.

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as a fixed point’ — in part because it is designedly hard to establish an authoritative fixed point of origin for Deguileville’s a.b.c., and in part because its translation into English by Chaucer and its subsequent transmission does not, always and inevitably, take it in a series of steps further away from Deguileville’s text.70 Rather, in the case of the beta manuscripts of the prose Vie 1, Chaucer’s translation into English allows an An ABC to be reintegrated ‘back’ (even as it is transmitted ‘forward’) into a newly reconfigured Pèlerinage. In the case of Lydgate’s Vie 2, its absence, rather than its presence, may be precisely the effect intended. The Romaunt of the Rose and the Belle Dame Sans Mercy, too, do not move the Romance of the Rose and Chartier’s Belle dame ‘forward’ into English so that their sources can be left temporally and spatially distant (in the past, in France). Rather, I have suggested, the act of interlingually reshaping them has allowed their translators both to incorporate, and to construct creatively, ongoing interpretative stances in relation to the poems. These stances arise from their engagement with much broader traditions of response to these texts, but they also contribute new ideas to those traditions and debates, underlining the extent to which what we might be tempted to conceptualize as temporal and spatial distance traversed by translation is in fact a sign of much more integrated, interlingual, and ongoing literary reflection and creativity. Much of the recent work on the multilingualism of medieval Britain has foregrounded the necessity of moving away from thinking in large or sweeping terms, and instead paying attention to the local and the particular — the individual manuscript or text which allows us to glimpse the particular usage of a particular community or individual — in the understanding that ‘language situation is complex, labile and specific to its setting’.71 In focusing the vast majority of this book on just two works, I have attempted to pay close attention to their individual strategies of translation, and have wished to resist constructing a larger outline or narrative about the practice of ‘Franco-English translation’ in this period, precisely because attending to the individual dynamics of translational practice and local decisions about manuscript presentation in specific cases is crucial. Equally, this book has underlined the extent to which a single, monolithic, or easily identifiable ‘Chaucerian voice’ — the voice of Chaucer himself, but most particularly later (apparent) attempts to simulate or echo his poetic practice — is perhaps sometimes harder to define and more shifting or multifaceted than this convenient label might suggest. To name a text Chaucerian is not simply to describe it: rather, it is an ideological move which defines, pressurizes, and prescribes readerly engagement with it. Rather than so doing, the assumptions which go with a critical term like ‘Chaucerian’, I have argued, must be questioned and nuanced. Only then will the manner in which intertextual connections with Chaucer are constructed and manipulated in individual cases and local moments — in this case, in translations — be uncovered.

70 Barr, Transporting Chaucer, p. 157. 71 Baswell, ‘Competing Archives’, p. 638, my emphasis.

Bibliography

Medieval Manuscripts With Shelfmarks Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 5014D ———, MS Peniarth 5015D Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 437 Arnhem, Holland, Bibliotheek, MS 79 Arras, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 845 ———, MS 897 Berkeley, University of California Bancroft Library, MS UCB 109 Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, MS gall. qu. 80 Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 554 Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, MS 9559–9564, 9561 Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2006 Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.2 ———, MS R.3.19 Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.1.6 (‘the Findern manuscript’) ———, MS Ff.5.30 ———, MS Gg.4.27 Chalon-sur-Saône, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 33 Châlons-en-Champagne, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 270 Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 492 ———, MS 686 Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, MS vat. lat. 4794 Cologny (Switzerland), Fondation Martin Bodmer, MS Bodmer 79 Copenhagen, Kongelike Bibliothek, MS GKS 2061 quarto ———, MS NKS 1768 folio ———, MS Thott 412 folio Coventry, City Record Office, MS Accession 325/1 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1 (‘the Auchinleck manuscript’) ———, Sutherland Collection, Papers of the Revd. Joass, single leaf fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose (termed ‘MS E’ in my discussion) Florence, Bibliotecca Riccardiana, MS 2755 Fribourg (Switzerland), Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, MS L 1200

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Glasgow, University Library, MS Hunter 239 (U.3.2) ———, MS Hunter 409 (V.3.7) The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliothek, MS 71 E 49 Lausanne, Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire, MS 350 London, British Library, MS Additional 17492 (‘the Devonshire manuscript’) ———, MS Additional 33996 ———, MS Additional 36983 ———, MS Additional 43491 ———, MS Cotton Tiberius A VII ———, MS Cotton Vitellius C XIII ———, MS Harley 372 ———, MS Harley 4431 ———, MS Harley 4826 ———, MS Harley 7335 ———, MS Harley 7578 ———, MS Royal 19 A III ———, MS Sloane 1710 ———, MS Stowe 947 ———, MS Stowe 952 London, Hatfield House, Cecil Papers, MS 297 London, Lambeth Palace (olim Sion College), MS Arch.L.40.2/E.44 Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun. A.6.91 Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS fr. 2 ———, MS fr. 66 Melbourne (Australia), State Library of Victoria, MS *096 G94 New York, Morgan Library and Museum (formerly Pierpont Morgan Library), MS M.948 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ewelme muniments (VII.A.47 [3]) ———, MS Bodley 638 ———, MS Douce 300 ———, MS Fairfax 16 ———, MS Laud Misc.740 ———, MS Selden Supra 57 ———, MS Tanner 346 Paris, Assemblée nationale, MS 1230 Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 2988 ———, MS 3170 ———, MS 3338 ———, MS 3521 ———, MS 3523 ———, MS 5071 Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS ang. 39 ———, MS fr. 378 ———, MS fr. 380 ———, MS fr. 604

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———, MS fr. 605 ———, MS fr. 606 ———, MS fr. 607 ———, MS fr. 797 ———, MS fr. 799 ———, MS fr. 800 ———, MS fr. 802 ———, MS fr. 803 ———, MS fr. 804 ———, MS fr. 825 ———, MS fr. 829 ———, MS fr. 835 ———, MS fr. 836 ———, MS fr. 924 ———, MS fr. 1131 ———, MS fr. 1138 ———, MS fr. 1139 ———, MS fr. 1169 ———, MS fr. 1559 ———, MS fr. 1563 ———, MS fr. 1569 ———, MS fr. 1571 ———, MS fr. 1572 ———, MS fr. 1573 ———, MS fr. 1574 ———, MS fr. 1587 ———, MS fr. 1642 ———, MS fr. 1727 ———, MS fr. 1818 ———, MS fr. 2195 ———, MS fr. 2201 ———, MS fr. 2230 ———, MS fr. 2264 ———, MS fr. 3939 ———, MS fr. 9345 ———, MS fr. 12588 ———, MS fr. 12595 ———, MS fr. 12779 ———, MS fr. 19154 ———, MS fr. 20026 ———, MS fr. 22551 ———, MS fr. 24389 ———, MS fr. 24390 ———, MS fr. 24391

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———, MS fr. 24440 ———, MS fr. 25458 ———, MS fr. 25524 ———, MS nouv. acq. fr. 4511-4512-4513 ———, MS nouv. acq. fr. 5094 ———, MS nouv. acq. fr. 20001 ———, MS nouv. acq. fr. 28047 ———, MS Rothschild 440 (I, 04, 31) ———, MS Smith Lesouëf 62 Paris, Musée Jacquemart André, MS 11 (686) Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Library, MS Codex 902 Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 1056 San Marino, California, Huntington Library, MS HM 744 Stockholm, Kungligabiblioteket, MS V.u.22 Versailles, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 153 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 2619 Warminster (UK), Longleat House, Marquess of Bath MS 258 Yale, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS Beinecke 1216 (formerly the Clumber Park Alain Chartier manuscript) In Private Collections without Shelfmarks The Cox Macro Roman de la rose The Ferrell Roman de la rose

Early Printed Books Richard Pynson, The boke of C[a]nterbury tales dilygently [and] truely corrected, an[d] newly printed (London, 1526); STC 5086 ———, The Boke of Fame made by Geffray Chaucer: with dyuers other of his workes (London, 1526); STC 5088 ———, The boke of Troylus and Creseyde newly printed by a trewe copye (London, ?1526); STC 5096 Thomas Speght, printed by Adam Islip, The workes of our ancient and learned English poet, Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (London, 1602); STC 5080 William Thynne, printed by Thomas Godfray, The Werkes of Geffray Chaucer (London, 1532); STC 5068 Wynkyn de Worde, A lytel tretyse called the dysputacyon or co[m]playnte of the herte thorughe perced with the lokyng of the eye (London, ?1516); STC 6915 ———, The noble and amerous aunc[y]ent hystory of Troylus and Creseyde (London, 1517); STC 5095 ———, The temple of glas (London, ?1506); STC 17033.7

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Unpublished Dissertations and Theses Appleton, Rosemary J., ‘Intertextuality and Gender in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.1.6’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2008) Blodgett, James, ‘William Thynne and his 1532 Edition of Chaucer’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University, 1975) Feng, Xiang, ‘Chaucer and the Romaunt of the Rose: A New Study in Authorship’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1990) Foley, Robert, ‘Richard Pynson’s Boke of fame and its non-Chaucerian Poems’, 2 vols (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1987) James-Maddocks, Holly, ‘Collaborative Manuscript Production: Illuminators and their Scribes in Fifteenth-Century London’, 2 vols (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of York, 2013) Knox, Philip, ‘The Romance of the Rose in Fourteenth-Century England’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2015) McRae, Joan E., ‘The Trials of Alain Chartier’s Belle Dame sans mercy: The Poems in their Cyclical and Manuscript Context’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Virginia, 1997)

Catalogues Briquet, Charles-Moïse, Les Filigranes: dictionnaire historique des marques du papier dès leur apparition vers 1282 jusqu’en 1600, A Facsimile of the 1907 edition with supplementary material contributed by a number of scholars, ed. by Allan Stevenson (Amsterdam: The Paper Publications Society, 1968) Illuminated Manuscripts from the Collection of Maurice Burrus (London: Christie’s, 2016) James, Montague R., The Western Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge: A Descriptive Catalogue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900–04) Jurot, Romain, Catalogue des manuscrits médiévaux de la Bibliothèque cantonale et universitiare de Fribourg (Zürich: Dietikon, 2006) Young, John, and Patrick Henderson Aitken, A Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Library of the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1908)

Online Databases and Websites The Anglo-Norman Dictionary: [accessed 31 July 2017] The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse: [accessed 31 July 2017] Dictionnaire du Moyen Français: [accessed 31 July 2017] The Digital Index of Middle English Verse: [accessed 31 July 2017]

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e-codices (The Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland): [accessed 31 July 2017] JONAS-IHRT CNRS: [accessed 31 July 2017] The Middle English Dictionary: [accessed 31 July 2017] Mooney, Linne, Simon Horobin, and Estelle Stubbs, Late Medieval English Scribes [accessed 31 July 2017] OPVS (Old Pious Vernacular Successes): [accessed 31 July 2017] The Oxford English Dictionary, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edn [accessed 31 July 2017] The ‘Roman de la Rose’ Digital Library [accessed 31 July 2017] The Romaunt of the Rose [accessed 31 July 2017]

Primary Works Chartier, Alain, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier, ed. by James Laidlaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) Chartier, Alain, Baudet Herenc, and Achille Caulier, Le Cycle de la ‘Belle dame sans mercy’: une anthologie poétique du XVe siècle (BNF MS Fr. 1131), bilingual edition ed., trans., and annotated by David Hult and Joan E. McRae (Paris: Champion, 2003) Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Prioress’s Tale, ed. by Walter W. Skeat, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1880) ———, Chaucer: The Minor Poems: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. by Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888) ———, Chaucer: The Minor Poems, ed. by Walter W. Skeat, 2nd and enlarged edn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896) ———, Chaucer: The ‘Romaunt of the Rose’ and The Minor Poems, ed. by Walter W. Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon, 1896) ———, The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. by Walter W. Skeat, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 7 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897) Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. and trans. by Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Champion, 2006) Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des epistres du debat sus le ‘Rommant de la Rose’, ed. by Andrea Valentini, Textes Littéraires du Moyen Âge, 29 (Paris: Garnier, 2014) Christine de Pizan, with Pierre Col, Gontier Col, Jean de Montreuil and Jean Gerson, Le Débat sur le ‘Roman de la rose’, ed. by Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1977) Debating the ‘Roman de la rose’: A Critical Anthology, ed. by Christine McWebb, trans. by Earl Jeffrey Richards (London: Routledge, 2007) Ein mittelenglisches Medizinbuch, ed. by Fritz Heinrich (Halle an der Salle: M. Niemayer, 1896) Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orléans’ English Book of Love, ed. by Mary-Jo Arn, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 138 (Binghamton: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1994)

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Guillaume de Deguileville, Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine de Guillaume de Deguileville, ed. by Johann J. Stürzinger (London: Nichols and Sons for the Roxburghe Club, 1893) [Vie 1] ———, Le Livre du Pèlerin de vie humaine (1355), ed. and trans. by Graham Robert Edwards and Phillipe Maupeu (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 2015) [Vie 2] Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose, ed. and trans. by Armand Strubel (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992) The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999) Lydgate, John, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall with Kathryn B. Locock, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 77, 83, and 92, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1899–1904) ———, The Minor Poems of John Lydgate, ii, ed. by Henry N. McCracken, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 192 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1934) ———, The Lyfe of Seynt Margarete in Middle English Legends of Women Saints, ed. by Sherry L. Reames (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2003) ———, Troy Book: Selections, ed. by Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1998). Marie de France, Lais, ed. by Alfred Ewert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960) The Minor Poems of the Vernon Manuscript, part 1 ed. by Carl Horstmann, part 2 ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 98 and 117, 2 vols (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & co for the Early English Text Society, 1892–1901) MS Tanner 346: A Facsimile, ed. by Pamela Robinson (Oklahoma: Pilgrim, 1980) The Myroure of our Ladye: Containing a Devotional Treatise on Divine Service, with a Translation of the Offices Used by the Sisters of the Brigittine Monastery of Sion at Isleworth during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. by John Henry Blunt, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, 19 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1873) Odd Texts of Chaucer’s Minor Poems, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Chaucer Society, 1868–80) Œuvres completes de Eustache Deschamps, ed. by Le Marquis du Queux de St Hilaire and Gaston Raynaud, 11 vols (Paris/Le Puy: SATF, 1878–1903) Pecock, Reginald, The Donet: Now First Edited from MS Bodl. 916 and Collated with ‘The poor mennis myrrour’ (British Museum Addl. 37788), ed. by Elsie Vaughan Hitchcock, Early English Text Society Original Series, 156 (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1921) Þe pilgrimage of þe lyfe of þe manhode, ed. by Avril Henry, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 288 and 292, 2 vols (London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1985–88) Poems of Cupid, God of Love, ed. and trans. by Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: Brill, 1990) Political, Religious and Love Poems from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth MS 306 and Other Sources, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 15 (London: Trübner for the Early English Text Society, 1866) Promptorium parvulorum, ed. by Albert Way, Camden Society (Royal Historical Society) Publications 25, 54, and 89 (London: Camden Society, 1843–65) The Romaunt of the Rose/Le Roman de la Rose, ed. by Ronald Sutherland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967)

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The Romaunt of the Rose, ed. by Charles Dahlberg, A Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 7 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999) Roos, Richard, The Belle Dame Sans Mercy, in Chaucerian Dream-Visions and Complaints, ed. by Dana M. Symons (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 2004), pp. 215–41 Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Centuries, ed. by Rossel Hope Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952) ‘A Tract on Hearing Confessions’, trans. by John Shinners, in Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader, ed. by John Shinners, 2nd edn (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2007), pp. 19–24 The Works, 1532 with Supplementary Material from the Editions of 1542, 1561, 1598 and 1602, ed. by Derek Brewer (Ilkley: Scolar, 1976)

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to plates Achille Caulier: 123, 124, 126, 138, 158–59, 165, 194 see also La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy Aitken, Patrick Henderson: 55 n. 5 Alain Chartier: 15–16, 21, 25, 30, 113–32, 133–48, 150, 152, 154–56, 159, 163–65, 169–73, 195, 198 Le Breviaire des nobles: 127, 129, 171 La Belle dame sans mercy: 15–16, 21, 113–38, 140–48, 150, 152, 154–56, 164–65, 171–73, 176, 198; for translation into English see Richard Roos Le Débat du reveille matin: 115 Le Livre des quatre dames: 115, 117 Maistre Alain, auctor, scribe and narrator: 114, 123, 133–34 Le Quadrilogue invectif: 135 see also La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy; manuscripts of La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy Alice Chaucer, Countess of Salisbury: 190 n. 47 Allen, Rosamund: 19 n. 18 Agincourt, Battle of (1415): 134 n. 4, 135 Antoine Vérard: 31, 128 n. 42 Appleton, Rosemary J.: 166–67 Armstrong, Adrian: 115 n. 6, 120 n. 24, 137, 143–44, 147 n. 47, 171 n. 118 Arn, Mary-Jo: 157 n. 77 The Assembly of Ladies: 32 n. 74, 167–68, 170 authorship, vernacular: 19–20, 23–26, 33, 36–46, 50, 76, 118–19, 182–83, 189, 191–93, 196

Badel, Pierre-Yves: 34 n. 6, 40, 42 n. 39, 44 n. 46 Baird, Joseph L.: 43 n. 41 Barański, Zygmunt: 34 n. 7 Baron, Helen: 161 n. 86 Barr, Helen: 74–75, 193 n. 55, 194–95, 198 Baswell, Christopher: 16–17 n. 11, 22 n. 31, 83 n. 135, 198 n. 71 Baudet Herenc: 124, 127–28, 138 n. 17, 165 n. 97, 171 see also La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy Baumgartner, Emmanuelle: 19 n. 17 Benson, C. David: 31 n. 71 Benson, Larry D.: 61, 72 n. 83 Bianco, Susan: 22 n. 32, 170 n. 113 Blamires, Alcuin: 35 n. 13, 106 n. 208 Blunt, John Henry: 88 n. 151 Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster: 76 n. 100, 176 n. 5 Blodgett, James: 55–56, 58 n. 15 Boethius: 81 n. 128, 163 n. 94 Boccaccio: 163 n. 94 Il Filostrato: 162–63 Boffey, Julia: 23, 28–30, 31 n. 70, 128, 130, 167, 168 n. 107, 169–70, 173 Boitani, Piero: 142 n. 32 Boroff, Marie: 75 n. 94, 77 Boyde, Patrick: 34 n. 7 Braet, Herman: 104 n. 200, 105 n. 203, 106, 108 n. 210, 177 n. 10 Brewer, Derek: 55 n. 2, 175 n. 3 Briquet, Charles-Moïse: 129 nn. 47–48 Brook, Leslie: 62 n. 32, 92 n. 169 Brown, Murray: 71 n. 77

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Brown-Grant, Rosalind: 45 nn. 48–50, 46 n. 51, 48, 49 n. 67 Brownlee, Kevin: 35 n. 13, 39 n. 28 Brownrigg, Linda: 60 n. 24 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn: 18 Brusendorff, Aage: 65 n. 47, 96 n. 179, 187 n. 38 Burrow, John: 44 nn. 44–45 Busby, Keith: 22 n. 31 Butterfield, Ardis: 22, 23 n. 36, 30 n. 66, 38 n. 24, 39 n. 27, 71 n. 78, 76–77, 79, 98–100, 115, 120 n. 27, 121 n. 28, 134 n. 4, 135, 136 n. 12, 137, 142 n. 33, 149, 150, 151 n. 59, 163 n. 94, 170 n. 114 Caie, Graham: 105 n. 202 Calin, William: 70 n. 74, 71 Camille, Michael: 104 n. 200, 170 n. 6, 179 n. 14 Campbell, Emma: 19 nn. 17 and 20, 21 n. 28, 177 n. 8 Campbell, Laura J.: 67 n. 61 Carley, James P.: 128 n. 42 Cannon, Christopher: 84 Cartlidge, Neil: 169 n. 111 Cayley, Emma: 15 n. 1, 42, nn. 39–40, 46–47, 50–51, 114 n. 4, 115 n. 6, 116, 117 nn. 15–16, 119, 120, 122, 124, 126, 127 n. 40, 131, 133, 137, 171 n. 118 Caxton, William: 30–31, 150 n. 58 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline: 34 n. 6 Chartier see Alain Chartier Charles, Duc d’Orléans: 116 n. 12, 119 n. 23, 120 n. 27, 157, 171 n. 121 Chaucer see Geoffrey Chaucer Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès: 17–19, 37 Christine de Pizan: 23 n. 33, 30–31, 33–36, 42–54, 91 n. 165, 97 n. 181, 119 n. 18, 141 n. 29, 150 n. 58 Contributor to La Querelle du Roman de la rose: 42–53 Le Dit de la rose: 35 L’Epistre au dieu d’amours: 35, 49 L’Epistre Othéa: 49 Le Livre de la cité des dames: 49 Les Proverbes moraulx: 23 n. 33, 30–31

presentation manuscripts: 34–35, 46, 49–50 Cligès see Chrétien de Troyes code-switching: 135–37 Coldiron, A. E. B.: 22 n. 32, 28, 31 nn. 68–69, 32, 34–35, 136, 150 n. 58 A Complaint to my Lodestar (poem): 157 Connolly, Margaret: 167 n. 103, 187 n. 38 Cooper, Helen: 112 n. 219, 153, 176 n. 5 Copeland, Rita: 19–20, 24 Crampton, Georgia Ronan: 175 n. 4, 183, 185 n. 29 Crawford, Anne: 128 Croft, Claire M.: 33 n. 3 Crow, Martin M.: 83 n. 133 Cursor Mundi: 186 n. 35, 187 n. 39 Dahlberg, Charles: 58 n. 14, 59–60, 63 nn. 35–37, 65 n. 47, 67 n. 58, 77–78 David, Alfred: 16 n. 8, 56–57, 59 n. 17, 76, 80 Le Débat du cœur et de l’œil see Michault Taillevent Dearnley, Elizabeth: 133 n. 3 Delany, Sheila: 153–54 Dembowski, Peter: 20 n. 22, 33 Deschaux, Robert: 169 nn. 111–12, 171 n. 121, 172 n. 122 Desmond, Marilynn: 42 n. 39, 47 n. 58 Diller, Hans Jürgen: 136 n. 9 Dinshaw, Carolyn: 150 Dor, Juliette: 175 n. 2 Downes, Stephanie: 34 n. 10 Doyle, A. I.: 81 n. 126, 186 n. 36, 187 n. 37 Doyle, Kara. A: 166–67 Driver, Martha: 102 n. 193 Dutton, Elisabeth: 29 n. 60 Duval, Frédéric: 177 n. 11 Echard, Siân: 121 n. 28 Eckhardt, Caroline: 16 n. 8, 66–67, 75–76, 83 Edwards, A. S. G.: 23, 29 n. 60 Edwards, Graham Robert: 175 n. 4, 178 n. 12, 185 n. 28, 192 n. 53, 193 n. 57 Ellis, Roger: 34 n. 10 Erler, Mary Carpenter: 35 nn. 12 and 14

i nd e x

Eustache Deschamps, Ballade 285: 69–72 Ewert, Alfred: 18 n. 15 The Eye and the Heart: 168–73 Wynkyn de Worde’s pamphlet of: 169 n. 11 see also Michault Taillevent Faral, Edmond: 179 n. 14 Feng, Xiang: 65–67 Fenster, Thelma S.: 35 nn. 12 and 14 Fleming, John V.: 45 n. 50, 109–11 The Flower and the Leaf: 63, 168, 170 Foley, Robert: 31 nn. 71–72, 113 n. 1 Forni, Kathleen: 22–23, 24 n. 40, 29–30 Freeman, James: 129 n. 45 Fribourg (Switzerland): 115, 125–26 Furnivall, Frederick J.: 63–64, 89 n. 157, 157 n. 75, 185 n. 30, 187 n. 38, 190 n. 47, 196 n. 69 Geltner, Guy: 110–11 Geoffrey Chaucer: 15, 21–32, 55–58, 62–78, 81 n. 128, 84, 93, 99 n. 186, 108–14, 127, 131 n. 55, 140–44, 147–54, 156–70, 173, 175–76, 183–89, 191–99 The Chaucerian: 25–32, 113–15, 141–44, 149–50, 166–69, 173, 175–76, 198–99 An ABC to the Virgin: 175–77, 183–89, 191–98 Anelida and Arcite: 160, 166–68, 170 The Canterbury Tales: 25 n. 45, 29, 31, 60 n. 24, 81 n. 126, 83 n. 133, 102 n. 192, 109–12, 193 n. 55, 195 The Complaint of Mars: 167–68 The Complaint of Venus: 148–49, 166 The Complaint unto Pity: 167–68, 170 The House of Fame: 23 n. 33, 31, 151, 154 n. 69, 167 The Legend of Good Women: 24 n. 38, 32 n. 74, 69–70, 72–5, 113 n. 1, 142, 144–45, 147, 150–54, 158, 165–66 The Oxford Group of Chaucer manuscripts: 29, 168, 170 n. 113, 173, 186 The Parliament of Fowls: 23 n. 33, 167–68, 170

Troilus and Criseyde: 29, 31, 39 n. 27, 79, 95, 102 n. 192, 131 n. 55, 150–52, 154, 156–63, 165–66, 170 n. 113 Gillespie, Alexandra: 29–30, 31 n. 72, 131 n. 55, 168, 170 n. 113 Gontier Col: 33, 35–36, 46 n. 53, 47 n. 58, 48–49, 52 Gross, Laila Z.: 175 n. 3 Gui de Mori: 33 n. 3, 41, 62, 78–80, 81 n. 129, 82, 91 n. 162, 93 Guillaume de Deguileville: 175–94, 196–98 see also Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine Guillaume de Lorris: 15, 33, 36–42, 73, 78, 80 n. 122, 83–88, 90, 91, 92, 98 n. 182, 120 n. 27, 158 n. 81, 179 see also Le Roman de la rose Guillaume de Machaut: 25 n. 36, 77 n. 107, 120 n. 27, 121 n. 28, 138 n. 19, 162 n. 90, 163 n. 94 Guillaume de Tignonville: 47–48 Hanly, Michael: 70 n. 74 Hanna III, Ralph: 25, 29–30, 95 n. 173 Harf-Lancner, Laurence: 17 Heale, Elizabeth: 160–61, 163 n. 93 Heinrich, Fritz: 89 n. 157 Henry IV, King of England: 34 Henry V, King of England: 135 n. 8 Henry VII, King of England: 128 n. 42 Henry VIII, King of England: 128 n. 42, 159, 163 Henry, Avril: 185 n. 30, 186 n. 34, 187 n. 38, 188 n. 41, 189 n. 43, 194 n. 58 Hicks, Eric: 33 n. 5, 35, 42 n. 38, 43 nn. 41–42, 44 n. 47, 45 n. 49, 46 nn. 51–54, 47 nn. 57, 59, and 61, 48 n. 63, 49 nn. 64–68, 50 n. 75, 51 nn. 78– 79, 52 nn. 80–82 and 84, 53 n. 85 Hitchcock, Elsie Vaughan: 89 n. 157 Hoccleve, Thomas: 25, 29, 35, 78, 95 n. 173, 141 n. 29, 160, 166, 168–69, 193 n. 55 Lepistre de Cupide: 35, 141 n. 29, 160, 166, 168, 169, 170 The Regiment of Princes: 25 n. 44, 95 n. 173, 195 n. 55 Holian, Gail: 106 n. 208

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Holton, Amanda: 71 n. 79, 153 Horobin, Simon: 25 n. 45, 54, 56, 57 n. 13, 59 n. 16, 66, 69, 70 n. 72, 75 n. 93 Hosington, Brenda: 28, 32 Hsy, Jonathan: 16–17, 21, 22 nn. 31–32, 136 n. 12, 137 n. 13 Hult, David: 15 n. 5, 19–20, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42 n. 39, 62 n. 31, 115, 118, 119, 120, 123 n. 32, 125 n. 35, 127, 131, 138 n. 17, 143, 155 n. 73 Huot, Sylvia: 34 nn. 6–7, 36 n. 19, 37 n. 23, 39 n. 28, 40 n. 31, 41 nn. 33 and 36–37, 53, 61 n. 30, 62, 78–82, 85, 87–88, 90–92, 96 nn. 175–76, 98 n. 182, 100 n. 189, 104 n. 200, 106 n. 207, 177 n. 10 Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France: 46 n. 53, 48, 50 Isabelle de Valois, Queen of England (widow of Richard II): 35–36 James, Montague R.: 32 n. 74 James-Maddocks, Holly: 55 n. 4, 60 n. 25, 93, 94 n. 170 Jean de Meun: 15, 33, 35 n. 13, 36–45, 47, 50, 62, 73, 78, 80, 85, 90, 91–92, 97–98, 123 n. 31, 158 n. 81, 159, 179, 192–93 see also Le Roman de la rose Jean de Montreuil: 33, 35, 48–50 Jean, Duc d’Angoulême: 83 n. 133, 120 n. 27 Jean, Duc de Berry: 35, 46 n. 53 Jefferson, Judith: 22 n. 31 John, Duke of Bedford: 34 John Gower: 25 n. 44, 38 n. 24, 39 n. 27, 81 n. 126, 95 n. 173, 121 n. 28, 142 n. 33, 150 John Howard, Duke of Norfolk: 128 John Montagu, 3rd Earl of Salisbury: 34 John Shirley: 187 n. 38, 188–89, 193 n. 54 Jurot, Romain: 115 n. 8 Kablitz, Andreas: 176 n. 6 Kaluza, Max: 63–64, 94 n. 171 Kane, George: 72 n. 84

Kane, John R.,: 43 n. 41 Kelly, Douglas: 20 Ker, Neil R.: 55 n. 5 Kinch, Ashby: 16, 25 n. 42, 114, 133, 134, 140–42, 144–45, 150, 151, 152 King Edward the iiijth (poem): 157 n. 75 Kleinhenz, Christopher: 22 n. 31 Knapp, Ethan: 26 n. 47, 34 n. 10, 35 n. 14 Knox, Philip: 34 nn. 6 and 8, 56 n. 10, 57 n. 11, 70 n. 73, 84–85 Kuhn, Alfred: 105 n. 203, 108 n. 210 La Belle dame sans mercy (French poem) see Alain Chartier La Belle Dame Sans Mercy (English translation) see Richard Roos Laidlaw, James: 46 n. 53, 50 n. 71, 117 n. 16, 123 n. 33, 129 nn. 47–48 Langdell, Sebastien: 25 n. 44 Langlois, Ernest: 61 n. 30, 62, 79, 81 n. 129, 90 n. 161, 91 n. 162, 92 n. 167, 101 n. 191, 110 n. 215 Legaré, Anne-Marie: 179 n. 14 Lerer, Seth: 23, 29 n. 60, 142 n. 32, 144 n. 42, 150 n. 58, 151 n. 59, 160 n. 82, 161–62, 163 n. 92 Lesnik-Oberstein, Karin: 34 n. 7 Li, Xingxhong: 61 n. 28, 65–66, 68 Lindembaum, Sheila: 141 n. 29 Lindner, Felix: 59, 60 n. 24, 63 n. 34 Locock, Kathryn B.: 185 n. 30, 190 n. 47, 196 n. 69 Long, Lynne: 76 Louis, Duc d’Orléans: 35 Lydgate, John: 22 n. 32, 24, 25, 29, 142 n. 32, 157 n. 75, 164–65, 167–69, 185, 189–98 engagement with Le Roman de la rose: 24, 192–93 The Churl and the Bird: 168–70 The Life of our Lady: 194 n. 55 The Life of Saint Margaret: 157 n. 75 The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (Vie 2 translation): 185 n. 30, 189–98 manuscripts of: 14, 185 n. 31, 189–90, 193 n. 54, 195–98

i nd e x

The Temple of Glass: 29, 113 n. 1, 142 n. 32, 168–70 The Troy Book: 164–65 Lynch, Kathryn: 76 n. 100, 77 n. 104 Machan, Tim William: 81 n. 128 manuscripts of La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy: 114, 115–18, 120–21, 122, 123, 124, 125–26, 127–32, 137, 138, 140, 145–46, 165, 171, 173 speaker-markers: 120–21, 138 illuminations: 123, 147 n. 47 printed copies of: 128 n. 42 manuscripts of The Romaunt of the Rose: 11, 55–61, 68–69, 78–79, 93–108 champ initials and borders: 103–05 rubrication: 97–103 running headers: 96–97 Marfany, Marta: 143 n. 38 Margaret Douglas, niece of Henry VIII: 161 n. 86 Margolis, Nadia: 35–36 Marguerite de Rohan: 120 n. 27 Marie de Clèves: 120 n. 27 Marie de France: 18 n. 15 Marshall, Celine Simon: 167 Marshall Lagarrigue, Isabel: 63 n. 36 Martin, Eva: 36 n. 20, 38 n. 24 Maupeu, Phillipe: 175 n. 4, 177 nn. 10–11, 178 n. 12, 180 n. 16, 185 n. 28, 192 n. 53, 193 n. 57 McCracken, Henry N.: 169 n. 111 McGrady, Deborah: 50 n. 70, 138 n. 19 McRae, Joan E.: 15 n. 5, 115, 116 n. 12, 117 n. 16, 118 n. 17, 119 n. 19, 120, 123 n. 31, 125 n. 35, 127 nn. 37–38, 129–31, 138 n. 17, 143 n. 36, 155 n. 73, 173 McWebb, Christine: 33 n. 4, 82 Meale, Carol: 190 n. 47 Mews, Constant J.: 50 n. 71 Meyer-Lee, Robert: 60 n. 24 Michault Taillevent: 127 n. 40, 169 nn. 111–12, 171–73 Le Débat du cœur et de l’œil: 127, 129, 169 n. 111, 171–73 Le Psautier des vilains: 171 n. 118

Mills, Robert: 19 n. 20, 21 n. 28, 177 n. 8 Minnis, Alastair: 20, 38 n. 25, 40 n. 30, 42 n. 39, 44 nn. 44 and 46, 45 nn. 48–49, 78 nn. 101 and 103 Miskimin, Alice: 24 n. 40 The Myrour of oure Ladye: 88 n. 151 Monaghan, Jennifer: 42 n. 39 Mooney, Lynne: 29 n. 59, 55 n. 5 Muscatine, Charles: 34 n. 6 Nafde, Aditi: 78 Nievergelt, Marco: 33 n. 2, 176 n. 6, 177 n. 10, 182–83 The Nine Ladies Worthy: 32 n. 74 Norton Smith, John: 173 n. 125 Nuttall, Jenni: 25 n. 44 Oton de Graunson: 149 Orr, Michael: 102 n. 193 Ovid: 35 n. 13, 37, 71, 151, 153, 158–59 Heroides: 153, 158 n. 81 Metamorphoses: 158 n. 81 Remedia Amoris: 160 Pace, George B.: 184 n. 26, 185 n. 29, 186, 187 n. 37 Pagés, Amédée M.: 136 n. 10 Parkes, Malcolm B.: 81 n. 126, 89 Partridge, Stephen: 95, 102 n. 192, 103 Pearsall, Derek: 16 n. 7, 25 Le Pèlerinage de vie humaine: 175–89, 191–92, 196–98 The a.b.c. (prayer): 175–77, 180–87, 189–90, 198 different authorial recensions of: (‘Vie 1’ and ‘Vie 2’): 176–83, 184, 192–93, 196 illuminations: 182–83, 184, 186 manuscripts of: 176 n. 6, 177 nn. 10–11, 179, 180 n. 16, 182–86 early printed editions of: 176 n. 6, 180 n. 16 French-language remaniements of: 179 n. 14 translations into English see Geoffrey Chaucer, An ABC; John Lydgate,

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The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (Vie 2 translation); Þe pilgrimage of þe lyfe of þe manhode (Vie 1 translation) see also Guillaume de Deguileville. Perkins, Nicholas: 25 n. 44 Perry, R. D.: 193 n. 54 Peters, Ursula: 176 n. 6, 177, 179 n. 14 Phillips, Helen: 109 n. 212, 149 n. 52, 176 nn. 5 and 7, 180 n. 15, 183–84, 189 Pickwoad, Nicholas: 69 n. 69 Pierre Col: 33, 42–46, 47 n. 61, 51–52, 97 n. 181 Pierre le Caron: 128 n. 42 Pomel, Fabienne: 177 nn. 10–11, 179 n. 14, 182 n. 20 Porter, Lela: 63 n. 36 Prendergast, Thomas A.: 23–24, 187 Prescott Hammond, Eleanor: 29, 167–68, 169 n. 111, 171 n. 120, 172 n. 122 Promptorium parvulorum: 88 n. 151, 89 n. 157 Putter, Ad: 21 n. 29, 22 n. 31, 25 n. 41, 114 nn. 3–4, 136 n. 9, 140–41, 143, 146 Pynson, Richard (printer): 22–24, 28, 30–31, 113 n. 1, 159, 167 The Boke of Fame made by Geffray Chaucer (1526): 22–23, 24 n. 40, 30–31, 113 n. 1, 159 The Canterbury Tales (1526): 31 Troilus and Criseyde (?1526): 31, 159 La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy: 15, 113–34, 137–44, 150–51, 155–56, 158, 165–66, 171, 173 Les Accusations contre la belle dame sans mercy: 124–25, 127–31, 171 La Cruelle femme en amours: 121, 124–26, 137–38, 155 La Dame lealle en amours: 121, 124–25, 133, 137 Les Erreurs du jugement de la Belle Dame sans mercy: 165 n. 97 L’Excusacion: 116–18, 121–25, 127, 133–34, 140–48, 155, 171

La Lettre envoyee par les dames: 116–18, 126, 171 L’Ospital d’amours: 123, 126, 138, 158–59, 194 La Requeste faicte et baille aux dames: 116–18, 126, 171 La Responce des dames: 117, 125, 144, 155 n. 72 see also manuscripts of La Querelle de la Belle dame sans mercy La Querelle du Roman de la rose: 15, 33–36, 41–53, 82, 97 n. 181 manuscripts of: 42–43, 46–53 see also Le Roman de la rose du Queux de Saint Hilaire, Marquis: 70 n. 71 Quinn, William: 176 Reames, Sherry: 157 n. 75, 176 n. 5 Reynaud, Gaston: 70 n. 71 Richard II, King of England: 35 Richard Roos, La Belle Dame Sans Mercy: 15–16, 21–26, 28–30, 32, 113–15, 131 n. 55, 132–73, 198. manuscripts of: 133 n. 2, 138–40, 159–63, 166–73 speaker-markers: 138–40 rhyme scheme and verse form: 141–44 Robbins, Rossell Hope: 130 Robertson, D. W.: 45 n. 50 Robinson, Olivia: 19 n. 20, 115 n. 6, 116 n. 12, 117 n. 14, 128 n. 42 Robinson, Pamela: 29 n. 58, 173 n. 125 Ronan Crampton, Georgia: 175 n. 4, 183, 185 n. 29 Ruggiers, Paul: 26 n. 47 Rollman, David: 31 n. 71 Le Roman de la rose: 15, 24, 33–34, 36–51, 53, 56–62, 65–76, 78–88, 89–112, 113, 119, 120, 123 n. 31, 140, 158, 177–79, 192–93, 198 B-recension of: 36 n. 19, 62, 80–83, 90–93, 108 Chaucer’s intertextual use of: 66, 70, 72–75, 108–12

i nd e x

dream within: 36, 38–40, 86–88, 90 n. 159, 104 n. 198, 177, 179 dual authorship of: 33, 36–42 manuscripts of: 12-13, 39–41, 51, 53, 87–88, 90–92, 96–108 misogyny and antifeminism within: 43, 97 n. 181 personification within: 45–46 Le Roman de la rose moralisé ( Jean Molinet): 33 n. 3, 41 n. 35, 82 The Romaunt of the Rose: 15–16, 22, 24, 26, 33, 34, 53, 55–70, 75–112, 113, 115, 140, 175, 198 Chaucer authorship of: 15, 22, 57–58, 62–69, 75–78, 111–12 ‘fragments’ of: 57 n. 11, 58–69, 91, 93 see also manuscripts of The Romaunt of the Rose St Bernard: 180, 196 Sanchez-Martí, Jordi: 66–67, 76, 83, 84 Scanlon, Larry: 25 n. 44 Schendl, Herbert: 136 n. 9 Schibanoff, Susan: 48 n. 63 Schoch, A. D.: 67 Scott, Kathleen: 55 n. 5, 104 n. 99, 190 Seaton, Ethel: 160 Seneca: 71 Le Serviteur sans guerdon: 127, 129 Seymour, Michael: 66 nn. 51–52, 81 n. 126 Sheppard, Jennifer M.: 69 n. 69 Shinners, John: 147 n. 48, 148 n. 50 Simpson, James: 27 n. 52, 193 n. 55 Skeat, Walter W.: 15–16, 23 n. 33, 27–28, 55 n. 2, 59, 60 n. 24, 61–65, 68, 96, 157, 175 n. 3 Smith, Margaret: 60 n. 24 Solterer, Helen: 50 n. 73, 117 n. 14, 119 n. 18, 123 n. 31, 134–35, 155 n. 72 Socrates: 71 Stow, John: 189 n. 46, 195–96 Strakhov, Elizaveta: 72 n. 82. Stratford, Jenny: 34 n. 9. Strohm, Paul: 187.

Strubel, Armand: 15 n. 4, 39 n. 27. Stubbs, Estelle: 55 n. 5. Stürzinger, Johann J.: 177 n. 10. Summerfield, Thea: 19 n. 18. Sutherland, Ronald: 15 n. 2, 34 n. 8, 58 n. 15, 59, 60 n. 23, 61–62, 64 n. 40, 65–66, 72 n. 83, 79–81, 83 nn. 132 and 135, 90 n. 159, 91 n. 164, 92, 95, 96 n. 177, 109, 110 n. 215. Swift, Helen: 34 n. 6, 44 nn. 46–47, 50 n. 72, 165 n. 97. Symons, Dana: 15 n. 3, 25 n. 41, 113 n. 2, 146, 167 Tarnowski, Andrea: 35 n. 13 Tasker Grimbert, Joan: 18 n. 16 Taylor, Jane: 119 nn. 18 and 23 The Ten Commandments of Love: 32 n. 74 Thomas Montagu, 4th Earl of Salisbury: 189–90 Thomas Howard, second son of the Earl of Norfolk: 161 n. 86 Thompson, John J.: 28, 29 n. 58, 167–68, 173, 176 n. 5, 185 n. 31, 186 n. 35, 193, 195 nn. 64 and 66 Thorpe, Nigel: 104 n. 199 Tomaryn Bruckner, Matilda: 18 Thynne, William, The Workes of Geoffrey Chaucer (1532): 27, 55–56, 58 n. 15, 60 n. 23, 61, 65 n. 44, 68, 69, 105 n. 202, 113 n. 1, 138, 160 Translation: 15–26, 30–31, 33, 34, 40, 55–112, 113–14, 132, 133–73, 175–99 Translatio studii et imperii: 17–18, 20, 37 Trevisa, John: 89 n. 152 Trigg, Stephanie: 23 n. 36, 26 n. 47 Tyrwhitt, Thomas: 23 Þe pilgrimage of þe lyfe of þe manhode (Vie 1 translation): 185–89, 194 n. 58, 198 manuscripts of: 186–89, 198 Valentini, Andrea: 33 n. 5, 35 n. 15, 46 nn. 53 and 55

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Venuti, Lawrence: 136 Vérard see Antoine Vérard Veysseyre, Geraldine: 177 n. 11 Viereck Gibbs Kamath, Stephanie A.: 22 n. 32, 24, 35 n. 14, 56 n. 10, 61 n. 29, 66, 70 n. 73, 73, 75, 83–84, 176 n. 6, 177 n. 10, 182–83, 189, 190 n. 51, 192–93, 194 Virgil: 151, 153 Wakelin, Daniel: 52 n. 83 Walters, Lori: 35 n. 13, 39 n. 28, 62 n. 31 Warren, Michelle: 16–17, 19 nn. 18–19, 20, 24, 56 n. 10

Way, Albert: 88 n. 151 Wimsatt, James: 70 nn. 71 and 74, 71–72 Windeatt, Barry: 77 n. 107, 154 n. 70, 162 n. 90 Winn, Mary-Beth: 128 n. 42 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn: 17 n. 11, 22 n. 31, 25 n. 44, 44 nn. 44–45, 149 n. 51 Wolfgang, Leonora: 169 n. 111 Wright, Laura: 136 n. 9 Wynkyn de Worde: 31, 159, 169 n. 111 Troilus and Criseyde (1517): 31, 159 Young, John: 55 n. 5

Medieval Identities: Socio-Cultural Spaces

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Robin Hood in Greenwood Stood: Alterity and Context in the English Outlaw Tradition, ed. by Stephen Knight (2011) The Performance of Christian and Pagan Storyworlds: Non-Canonical Chapters of the History of Nordic Medieval Literature, ed. by Lars Boje Mortensen and Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, with Alexandra Bergholm (2013) Speaking to the Eye: Sight and Insight through Text and Image (1150-1650), ed. by Thérèse de Hemptinne, Veerle Fraeters, and María Eugenia Góngora (2013) Conversion and Identity in the Viking Age, ed. by Ildar Garipzanov, with the assistance of Rosalind Bonté (2014) Melissa Pollock, The Lion, the Lily, and the Leopard: The Crown and Nobility of Scotland, France, and England and the Struggle for Power (1100-1204) (2015) Karin E. Olsen, Conceptualizing the Enemy in Early Northwest Europe: Metaphors of Conflict and Alterity in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Early Irish Poetry (2017) Dawn Marie Hayes, Roger II of Sicily: Family, Faith, and Empire in the Medieval Mediterranean World (2020)