Les enLuminures Ltd. 23 EAST 73RD STREET 7TH FLOOR, PENTHOUSE NEW YORK, NY 1021 S H A R E D TEL: (212) 717 7273 t e x t m a n u s c r i p t s 7 S H A R E D LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR MANUSCRIPTS IN THE MIDDLE AGES LAURA LIGHT INTRODUCTION BY CHRISTOPHER DE HAMEL WITH DENNIS DUTSCHKE, STEPHEN MOSSMAN, EMILY RUNDE, JOHN VAN ENGEN, AND MARY BETH WINN t e x t m a n u s c r i p t s 7 Les enLuminures Ltd. 23 EAST 73RD STREET 7TH FLOOR, PENTHOUSE NEW YORK, NY 10021 TEL: (212) 717 7273 S H A R E D LANGUAGE: VERNACULAR MANUSCRIPTS IN THE MIDDLE AGES P R I C E L I S T T E X T M A N U S C R I P T S 7 I . F R E N C H $ 1 PS.-ARISTOTLE, Les Secrets des secrets (Secret of Secrets) TM 720 140,000 2 JACQUES LEGRAND, Le livre de bonnes meurs TM 722 35,000 3 La voie d’enfer et de paradis TM 775 100,000 4 Collection of Prayers TM 938 10,000 5 Les sept fruits de la tribulation (The Seven Fruits of Tribulation); … TM 466 98,000 6 CHARLES BONIN (translator) of JEROME, Letter LIV to Furia TM 935 160,000 7 Rondeaux by JEAN MAROT, JEAN D’AUTON, PIERRE GRINGORE … TM 860 65,000 8 Collection of Medical Recipes and Health Regimens TM 937 95,000 9 Les roys de la tres crestienne maison de France TM 748 27,000 10 PHILIPPE DE VIGNEULLES, La chanson de geste de Garin le Loherain 175,000 11 SJEoHmAmN aDirEe B aAbUréDgRéE UdeILs, ducs de Orléans-Longueville 110,000 12 Traicté d’aymer Dieu, anonymous French Translation TM 671 23,000 II. I T A L I A N 13 De fatti e detti memorabili della città di Roma ad Tiberio Cesare TM 813 80,000 14 Cronica degli pontifci e degli imperatori TM 117 35,000 15 ZANOBI DA STRADA, Morali di Santo Gregorio papa sopra il libro di Job TM 796 65,000 16 PRUDENTIUS OF TROYES, Flores psalmorum (Flowers of the Psalms); … TM 891 28,000 17 El transsito del gloriossisimo santo Jeronimo doctore eximio; … TM 605 22,000 18 Ordinal and Processional (Dominican Use) TM 906 32,000 19 ANTONIO FIORDIBELLO, De auctoritate ecclesiae; … TM 750 12,000 Les enLuminures Ltd. 23 EAST 73RD STREET 20 Dell’affnare l’oro e l’argento (On the Refining of Gold and Silver) TM 897 27,000 7T NH EFWLO YOORR, KPE, NTYH 1O0U02SE1 III. G E R M A N TEL: (212) 717 7273 21 Anonymous German translations of PS.-HUGH OF ST VICTOR … TM 855 48,000 CONTENTS PREFACE 7 INTRODUCTION 8 I. FRENCH 12 II . ITALIAN 46 II I . GERMAN 70 IV. DUTCH 90 V. E N G L I S H 106 BIBLIOGRAPHY 120 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 126 PREFACE I HAVE WORKED ON VERNACULAR MANUSCRIPTS ALL MY (SCHOLARLY) LIFE. I LIKE TO SAY this is partly because, although I wanted to take Latin in high school, my father who was a famous scientist insisted that his high school Latin had proved useless to him professionally. Instead, I took French. But what happened? I became a medievalist not a scientist. To make up for my defciency, I did take intensive Latin one summer in graduate school, mastering Cicero, Virgil, Catullus, and others all in an eight-hour a day eight-week course. However, even if I still considered my Latin inadequate, I think the full answer to what attracts me in vernacular manuscripts lies elsewhere. STUDIES ON THE TRANSITION FROM MANUSCRIPT TO PRINT CULTURE AND ON THE HISTORY and collecting of single leaves and cuttings are central to my contributions on the Middle Ages. But my research projects on vernacular manuscripts have been closest to my heart. Profoundly inspired by L.M.J. Delaissé, with whom I studied in graduate school, I was determined to follow in his footsteps to explore what he considered to be the “authentic, spontaneous vision and realistic representation of the external world and human activity” in Dutch manuscripts (he was writing A Century of Dutch Manuscript Illumination at the time). This led me to learn medieval and modern Dutch and study Dutch vernacular Bible illumination, which I conjectured encouraged viewers, through a close interaction of text and image, to identify with people, places, and events in the sacred Bible as though they were extensions of their everyday world. Christine de Pizan, the subject of my next book, opened up the world of the royal court, for whom she wrote (and had illuminated) timely advice in an uncertain political climate to the king and his circle. I found Chrétien de Troye’s courtly romances to be mirrors of men and women in medieval feudal culture. Even certain physical manuscripts I consulted were redolent of everyday life, stained with spilled wine, used as a memo for a kitchen shopping list, and bearing reminders of routine activities on the household estate. WORKS IN THIS CATALOGUE – WHICH OWES ITS INITIATIVE AND REALIZATION ALMOST entirely to Laura Light – unveil the “authentic, spontaneous vision” of people in medieval France, Italy, Germany, the Low Counties, and Britain. Laura Light’s compelling narrative connects the manuscripts one to another. Giving advice to widows, a translator puts Saint Jerome’s famous letters into French in a unique copy probably for a high-born woman. Toiling in the Italian metal industry in towns, metalworkers can follow instructions on minting gold and silver coins in their own language. Monks and nuns, with the spread of lay piety, reenact age-old traditions of meditation and prayer in shared, spoken language instead of Latin. Prominent scholars graciously contributed individual essays on vernacular manuscripts in each country, emphasizing both the uniqueness and commonality in the selections. Christopher de Hamel’s engaging introduction reminds us that reading vernacular manuscripts enables us to “listen in directly” to the daily world of the Middle Ages. Sandra Hindman .... . ....... . . . . . 6 INTRODUCTION Christopher de Hamel THERE IS ONE WAY IN WHICH MANUSCRIPTS ARE DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER WORKS their owners. This therefore excluded the peasants, who had neither literacy nor access to readers. of art: they can talk. They tell us things in human speech. They have words. Read a medieval By the later thirteenth or early fourteenth century we already have great vernacular monuments such manuscript aloud and you are actually hearing a person’s voice from fve hundred or a thousand as the Roman de la Rose in French and Dante’s Divina Commedia in Italian, mingling adventurous years ago, and it is a captivating experience. Shared language is the basis of all communication, and literature with Christian piety. What is interesting from a modern perspective is how works like these manuscripts can actually speak to us. are entirely readable today to speakers of French or Italian respectively, whereas English texts of the late thirteenth century, such as Havelok the Dane, are almost incomprehensible to most people now THE MAJORITY OF WESTERN EUROPEAN MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS ARE WRITTEN IN FORMS without having learned Middle English; Anglo-Norman is extinct. The rate of language change is of classical Latin. This began its long life as the vernacular language of ancient Rome (although formal something very striking in vernacular manuscripts. Latin was possibly never precisely the conversational idiom of the street), but by the early Middle Ages it had become a linguistic cipher to be learned by anyone who aspired to literacy. Few people still FASHIONS TRICKLE DOWN THROUGH SOCIAL RANKS. THE MIDDLE CLASSES IMITATED THE spoke Latin in their daily lives, although monks were encouraged to try to do so. It was principally nobility in commissioning vernacular manuscripts. Texts of patriotic history and good manners and a language maintained for use in books and the liturgy of the Church. It must have been rather like courtly romance entered manorial households. Literacy moved away from the Latin-based monopoly being Jewish in (say) Poland in the nineteenth century: in domestic life, most people actually spoke of the Church. It may be that the owners were actually reading texts themselves, whereas a great Polish or Yiddish, but when they went to school they were taught to read and write in Hebrew, a prince or king of an earlier generation would often have heard a story read aloud. By the fourteenth formal language of the ancient world. Latin was similar. For much of its two millennia of usage, Latin century the mercantile classes needed to read in order to conduct commerce, and it was usually in their was (and sometimes still is) kept for writing rather than conversation. With its complicated grammar own languages. At the end of the Middle Ages probably most people in towns had some experience of and fexible word order, it is actually simpler to read than it is to speak. literacy. Conventional Latin texts give a picture of a quite narrow intellectual elite, but the vernacular encompassed everyone. People wrote and read words as they were actually spoken; spelling varied NO SPOKEN LANGUAGE STAYS UNCHANGED, AS IT FOREVER ABSORBS AND ADAPTS, NONE with local usages, unlike Latin, which is unvarying and universal. Latin manuscripts were meant to more so than English. Writing, however, stands still. Even now, written English is generally more old- sound the same, whether copied in ffth-century Rome or ffteenth-century Germany. Vernacular fashioned and structured than the way most of us actually speak in our daily lives. As Roman civilization texts, by contrast, reproduced language as their authors or scribes heard it. With enough knowledge, disintegrated and merged with barbarian cultures, books were still being made in traditional Latin but many vernacular manuscripts can be localized by phonetics and spelling alone. conversational speech was constantly evolving through dialects and verbal imports into recognizable and distinctive regional languages. Linguistic historians will differ about when we can confdently IF WE WANT TO EAVESDROP ON THE ACTUAL WORDS OF THE MEDIEVAL COURTS, OR THE say that French or German or Italian (for example) really became distinct languages, but by some time songs of love, or the banter of trade, or the inmost thoughts of private piety, it will not be in Latin but around the ninth or tenth century there were undoubtedly national tongues whose recognizable in medieval French, English, German, Dutch, or Italian. Most medieval readers articulated words aloud descendants are spoken today. as they read, and scribes while copying almost certainly did so, at the very least whispering each phrase as they wrote it down. Read a medieval manuscript in the vernacular and we hear those very voices: SUSTAINED WRITTEN TEXTS IN VERNACULAR LANGUAGES USUALLY CAME LATER. MANY OF we listen in directly to their daily world. the earliest manuscripts in vernacular languages were associated with women and with the aristocracy, both groups which were unlikely to have been taught to read Latin. They commissioned texts of personal devotion or chivalric romance and history. Books were probably often initially read aloud to .... . ....... . . . . . 8 I . F R E N C H .... . ....... . . . . .1 0 VERNACULAR MANUSCRIPTS IN FRANCE Mary Beth Winn FIVE MAJOR CATEGORIES OF FRENCH LITERATURE SOUGHT BY LATE MEDIEVAL READERS WORKS OF FICTION INCLUDE THE PROSE VERSION OF THE EPIC POEM, GARIN LE LOHERAIN, are represented in this collection: religious, moralizing, scientifc, historical, and fctional (Duval, 2009). by the late 15th-century author Philippe de Vigneulles (no. 10). Herbin’s studies of Garin (since 1988) The categories overlap, and over-arching perspectives connect them, regardless of the material form have contributed to a veritable food of recent scholarship on the prose versions of medieval verse or specifc subject of the manuscripts. poems that proliferated in late medieval France (Cifarelli, 2017; Colombo Timelli, 2014(1)(2); Herbin, 2014(1) (2)). RELIGIOUS WORKS (NOS. 4, 5, 6, 12) ATTEST TO THE DEVOTIONAL READINGS AND practices of the laity. Among the texts in the small Prayer Book (no. 4) is one that is also known POETRY, HOWEVER, RETAINED ITS VALUE, AND THE POPULARITY OF A TRADITIONAL FORM in a Book of Hours printed c. 1502 in Paris by Philippe Pigouchet (Rézeau, 1986, R 559). Pastoral is nowhere more evident than in the volume of rondeaux dating from c. 1500 (no. 7). Although the literature was often directed to women. Saint Jerome’s letter to the young Roman widow Furia was manuscript identifes no authors, concordant sources enable attributions to such renowned poets as later translated for and dedicated to an unidentifed French noblewoman by the cleric Charles Bonin Jean Marot, Octovien de Saint-Gelais, and Jean Picart. This manuscript was prepared for a member of (no. 6). The depiction of Furia recalls the numerous images of French noblewomen of the ffteenth a noble, if not royal, court at which the composition and recitation of rondeaux was a social activity, and sixteenth centuries, whose mourning attire underscored their power (Broomhall, forthcoming). not limited to professional poets. Rondeaux were also, as here, collected into books, which might The late Middle Ages witnessed a proliferation of spiritual guides for lay readers (no. 5). The Miroir tell a story. This manuscript was in fact published in 1893 by the count Auguste de Blangy as a “petit d’or de l’ame pecheresse is a translation of a well-known Latin treatise copied from a printed edition roman,” a “confession of a lover” whom he identifed, incorrectly as it turns out, as Gringore (Pierre issued in Paris c. 1482; manuscripts copied from printed books were more common than one might Gringore, Rondeaux contenant la confession d’un amoureux). The poems are not organized, as is expect (Blair, 2015). A study of this translation would be enriched by consideration of the English often the case, into dialogues between male and female speakers. In fact, the female-authored texts translation made from the French by Margaret of Beaufort (Morley, 2016). usually occur in pairs. Five of the female-voiced poems are from Jean Marot’s collection, Rondeaux de femmes. Questions of authorship, form, and assemblage of lyric pieces into manuscript and printed MORALIZING WORKS SOMETIMES TOOK THE FORM OF DREAM VISIONS OR ALLEGORICAL recueils continue to generate current research (Taylor, 2007; Fery-Hue, 2011). voyages such as La voie d’enfer et de paradis (no. 3). The Livre de bonnes meurs by the Augustinian friar Jacques Legrand (c. 1360-c. 1415), and the Secrets des secrets were among the most widely read UNIQUE COMPOSITIONS (NO. 8) OR TRANSLATIONS (NOS. 6, 12), SOLE SURVIVING EXAMPLES of moralizing texts (nos. 2 and 1). Scientifc works are represented by a remarkable manuscript of or rare versions of famous works (nos. 1, 2, 7) – most of the texts are still unpublished and largely medical remedies for various illnesses and conditions, followed by a “régime de santé” and a treatise unknown, awaiting critical editions. They are presented in a variety of scripts, on paper or on on the medicinal properties of plants (no. 8; for recent research on related materials, Hillard, 2012, parchment. The artists include the celebrated Master of Spencer 6 and the Master of the Paris Entries and Martin, 2017). (nos. 6 and 11 ). Five (nos. 3, 6, 8, 9, 10) are bound in contemporary bindings of velvet, parchment, or blind-tooled leather, refecting illustrious provenance. Connections with printed books (nos. 4, 5, THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE NEED TO JUSTIFY MILITARY AND 7, 12) raise important questions of publication, readership, and patronage that continue to spawn political action fostered the writing of historical works focusing on contemporary events. Les Roys research in the history of the book. Women play decisive roles as dedicatees and owners, authors and de la tres crestienne maison de France provides a brief chronology of the French kings up to Louis XII, readers (nos. 6, 7), their presence underscoring issues that pervade contemporary feminist scholarship asserting divinely ordained royal power by situating them frmly as the champions of Christianity (no. 9). as well as medieval and Renaissance studies. Jean de Baudreuil’s summary of the rights of the Orléans-Longueville dukes to lands under their rule was commissioned by and dedicated to Duke Louis II (no. 11). .... . ....... . . . . . 1 2 I . F R E N C H 1. PS.-ARISTOTLE, Les Secrets des secrets (Secret of Secrets), anonymous translation In French, illuminated manuscript on parchment France (perhaps Arras or Tournai, or Paris?), c. 1300-1320 One historiated initial and border by an anonymous artist in the style of Jean Pucelle We begin with a two-fold translation – a French translation of a Latin translation of an Arabic text. This is the earliest manuscript in our catalogue in any language; French was widespread as a written language only in the thirteenth century. The Secret of Secrets is written as an extended letter from the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (384-322 BC) to his former pupil, Alexander the Great (356-320 BC), offering a guide to the art of government and correct royal conduct in the broadest sense, including moral and political advice, as well as information on science and medicine, astrology, physiognomy, alchemy, numerology, and magic. Although accepted as part of the Aristotelian corpus in the Middle Ages, this is actually an Arabic text that was written sometime before the late tenth century by an anonymous author. Translated into Latin twice during the Middle Ages, frst in the twelfth century and then c. 1230 by Philip of Tripoli, it became a medieval bestseller, surviving in many hundreds of manuscripts. The French version in our manuscript – early and known in only four complete copies – is a very faithful translation of the Latin that includes all the scientifc advice (medical, alchemical, astrological, and so forth). Most of the other more broadly disseminated French translations concentrated only on the moral and political advice to the sovereign – transforming a scientifc Latin text into a “Mirror of Princes.” We do not know for whom this small and personal manuscript was made; it is a high-quality copy, illuminated, and on excellent parchment. This particular translation was once thought to have been commissioned by Charles V (1338-1380), king of France from 1364-1380. Its identifcation by Professor Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas in our manuscript has disproven this theory, and this copy is very likely a presentation copy made for someone of high rank and wealth who commissioned the translation early in the fourteenth century. [TM 720] DESCRIPTION:  67 folios on parchment, wanting three leaves, written on 25 lines in a gothic bookhand, polished gold initials on colored grounds, one 6-line historiated initial, one full border of gold and colored bars, slightly trimmed and cockled, 18th-century gold-tooled red morocco binding, small scuffs, stains and scratches. Dimensions 156 x 112 mm. LITERATURE: Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, “Révélation hermétique et savoir occulte de l’orient dans le Secretum secretorum et les Secrets des secrets français,” in Trajectoires européennes du ”Secretum secretorum” du Pseudo-Aristote (XIIIe-XVIe siècle), ed. Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas, Margaret Bridges, Jean- Yves Tilliette, Alexander Redivivus 6, Turnhout, 2015, pp. 57-106; S. J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of a Pseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2003. .... . ....... . . . . . 1 4