Crestien’s Guillaume d’Angleterre / William of England

Description

An edition with facing annotated translation of the twelfth-century Medieval French popular romance Guillaume d’Angleterre. The claim to fame of this verse narrative is to have had its authorship attributed (falsely) to Chrétien de Troyes, the most famous of all twelfth-century Medieval French narrative poets. This prototypical adventure romance and is representative of a literary genre that has recently seen a renewal of interest among medieval literary critics.

An amusing tale of late twelfth-century social mobility, the romance tells of a bewildering series of adventures that befall a fictitious king who deliberately abandons his royal status to enter the ‘real’ world of knights, wolves, pirates and merchants. He and his family, dispersed by events between Bristol, Galway and Caithness, are finally reunited at Yarmouth thanks to a climactic stag hunt.

The book is designed for students of French, Medieval Studies, Comparative Literature and English, and for all medieval scholars interested in having an English version of a typical medieval adventure romance. It is the first authoritative English translation of this text, and all of its critical material is new.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/TXVU9029

Introduction

Conspectus of principal narrative episodes

Guillaume d’Angleterre ◊ William of England

Corrections to the manuscript text

Bibliography

Index of persons and places

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Inglaterra
• Edad Media
• Literature
• Old French
• French literature
• Middle Ages
• England
• Chrétien de Troyes

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 22 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781905816712
• Langue: English

Extrait

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WILLIAM OF ENGLAND
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CRESTIEN’S GUILLAUME D’ANGLETERRE
WILLIAM OF ENGLAND
AN EDITION AND ANNOTATED TRANSLATION
IAN SHORT
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First published in 2021 by University of Exeter Press Reed Hall, Streatham Drive Exeter EX4 4QR UK www.exeterpress.co.uk
© Ian Short 2021
The right of Ian Short to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback: 9781905816705 ePub: 9781905816712 PDF: 9781905816729
Cover image: MS Heidelberg University Cod. Pal. germ. 848, f. 202v (Codex Manesse, c. 1300–1340)
Typeset in Garamond by BBR Design, Sheffield
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CONTENTS
  1 Introduction
  9 Conspectus of principal narrative episodes
 11 Guillaume d’Angleterre   William of England
176 Corrections to the manuscript text
179 Bibliography
184 Index of persons and places
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INTRODUCTION
Hardly had Chaucer’s Sir Thopas warmed to the task of telling his tale on the way toCanterbury when he found the Host cutting short his doggerel with a memorablycogent example of literary criticism: 1
By God, he said, to put it plainly in a word, Your trashy rhyming isn’t worth a turd.
Such was the medieval reputation of texts that modern critics have come to categorizeas popular romance, and such it has remained until relatively recently. Only in thecurrent generation have medievalists come to recognize that poetic narratives suchas Horn , Haveloc , Waldef , Gui de Warewic , Fergus and Fouke le fitz Waryn are literary works in their own right, not pale and failed imitations of the much-lauded courtly romance. They deserve, accordingly, to be taken seriously by critics, and their literary qualities investigated and acknowledged instead of automatically denigrated anddismissed. 2
The rambling adventure romance in Medieval French octosyllabic coupletsknown as Guillaume d’Angleterre belongs to a genre that is thought to have beendelivered orally to a predominantly non-courtly, perhaps non-aristocratic, audience. 3 It was, therefore, their public’s literary tastes that largely dictated the story’s content,and the authors must have taken care to respect and reflect this requirement. Just likethe better known courtly romance, these romances were designed as entertainment,but unlike their more elaborate and sophisticated cousins, they did not necessarilyset out to pose interpretative challenges, to analyse characters’ motives or to operateas metaphorical constructs. Their principal concern lay with the narrative, hencethe name of adventure romance by which they are also known. Sometimes theyare referred to as recipe romances in honour of their widespread use of the same

1 Benson 1988: 216 (929–30): ‘By God’, quoth he, ‘for pleynly, at a word, Thy drasty rymyng is natworth a toord!’
2 See Putter & Gilbert 2000, Radulescu & Rushtion 2009, Purdie & Cichon 2011.
3 For general twelfth-century background see Harper-Bill & Van Houts 2003: 191–213, Short 1992;cf. also Clanchy 1993. For the Anglo-Norman dimension, see Crane 1986, Field 2011, Weiss 2015.Legge’s theories on ‘ancestral romance’ (Legge 1963: 139–75) are no longer regarded as tenable; seeDannenbaum 1981–82, Holden 1984: 33–36.

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William of England

stereotyped literary motifs. Many of them also have striking similarities in narrativestructure, specifically in the use they make of the themes of exile and return, ofseparation and reintegration, of identities lost and regained, of families dispersedand reunited. Social structures too are a particular point of interest in certain ofthese romances. The characters they create tend to be somewhat typecast and staticand to lack the sort of psychological dynamic which Chrétien de Troyes confers,for example, on Lancelot and Perceval, or the anonymous author of La Châtelainede Vergy on her or his tragic heroine.
Guillaume d’Angleterre is, at the same time, a notorious work of literature,even though there must be few people who can truthfully claim to have read itin its entirety. Its notoriety comes from the name under which its author writes:Crestiens, which past critics have not hesitated to identify with that of the mostgifted of all late twelfth-century French poets, Chrétien de Troyes. 4 There have, however, been many dissident voices, and over the years a lively critical debate ensued over the text’s disputed authorship. 5 It is a wonder to some contemporary criticsthat their predecessors could ever seriously have thought Guillaume d’Angleterre worthy of the same pen as the one that wrote Le Conte du Graal , for instance. Thetwo genres are admittedly very different, but it now seems clear to the majority ofcritics that the poets in question are not only worlds apart but belong to differentuniverses as far as their literary skill is concerned. Their romances have nothingin common in terms of their subject matter, in the richness of their lexis or thefluency of their syntax, in the architecture of their narratives, in the subtlety oftheir character portrayal or in the exploration of the various motivations that drivetheir protagonists forward.
The prevailing opinion is that Guillaume d’Angleterre is best viewed indepen-dently and in its own right, uncluttered by the speculative critical baggage that ithas come over the years to inherit. The time is right, perhaps, to turn the page, evento the extent of embracing François Zufferey’s recent contention, namely that thelanguage of Guillaume d’Angleterre is Picard and not, as has always been taken forgranted, Champenois, and that its author could usefully be rebaptized Chrétiend’Amiens. 6 That this poet could have written sometime in the 1180s or 1190s seems,on the other hand, to be one of the few suppositions about the text that is not opento serious dispute. Such precision must be, however, in large measure a function ofthe text’s supposed links to Chrétien de Troyes, and once these are stripped away,our poem is left floating somewhere between the end of the twelfth and the startof the thirteenth century.

4 Frappier 1958: 69–81, Poirion et al. 1994: 1410–34, Kay 1997, Stahuljak et al. 2011: 67–75.
5 For a résumé of the authorship debate see Holden 1988: 31–37.
6 Zufferey 2008.

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Introduction

Only two manuscripts preserve Guillaume d’Angleterre : Paris BnF fr. 375,ff. 240v–247v, and Cambridge St John’s College B9, ff. 55r–75v. 7 These are outnum-bered by the scholarly editions of which there are, to date, seven. The one I printbelow uses the Cambridge manuscript as its base, as did that produced by A.J.Holden in 1988. There are numerous translations into Modern French (includingthose by Trotin in 1974, Berthelot in 1994 and Ferlampin-Acher in 2007), but only one, as far as I am aware, into English (by David Staines in 1990). Heinz Klüppelholz produced a Modern German translation in 1987 facing Foerster’s edition of 1899. Wehave no idea what the readership of this text was in the Middle Ages, but it can beassumed that it was not very widely known. It comes, therefore, as something of asurprise to discover that Edward I had a copy, which he inherited from his motherEleanor of Provence. 8 At least a modest circulation for the work can be inferredfrom the survival of a Spanish prose translation from the fourteenth century, 9 and alate, perhaps independent, reworking known as the Dit de Guillaume d’Angleterre . 10
Even a critic as insightful as Paul Zumthor, writing in the 1970s, still lets thespectre of Chrétien colour his view of Guillaume d’Angleterre . This is how, in the pages he devotes to Chrétien de Troyes in his influential Essai de poétique médiévale , he sums up the work:
Reste le cas douteux d’un conte de Guillaume d’Angleterre ; signé “Chrétien”, mais dont l’agencement et le style s’accordent mal avec le reste de l’oeuvre. Cette édifiante et romanesque histoire en 3 366 octosyllabes retrace les malheurs,l’errance et le triomphe final de saint Guillaume, roi supposé d’Angleterre:mélange d’aventures assez décousues, fourrées de sermons, et développant unthème hagiographique traditionnel (le saint renonce à tout au monde et fuit au désert, où éclatent ses vertus). Il est notable que, par la localication des aventure non moins que par le merveilleux, cette histoire s’apparente à la “matière deBretagne.”
There remains the dubious case of Guillaume d’Angleterre which bears the signature of one ‘Chrétien’, but which exhibits a construction and a style out ofkilter with the rest of his works. This is an edifyingly romantic story which, in3,366 octosyllabic verses, relates the misfortunes, the wanderings and ultimatetriumph of a Saint William, the imaginary king of England. It is a mixture ofdisjointed adventures stuffed full with sermons and elaborating on a traditionalhagiographic theme (the saint who gives up everything in this world and flees tothe desert where his virtues come bursting forth). Other noteworthy features are the actual place-names given as locations for where the adventures take place, and

7 On the relationship between the two manuscripts, see Serra 2010.
8 Bullock-Davies 1981: 34, Prestwich 2017.
9 Holden 1988: 12.
10 Legge 1963: 142–43; ed. Buzzeti-Gallarati 1990.

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the different ways in which the supernatural is deployed, both of which clearly link the story to the ‘Matter of Britain’. 11
And to hedge his bets, and exercising a caution that was uncharacteristic of hiscritical methodology, he adds as an afterthought:
Le penchant de l’auteur à un certain pittoresque du détail n’est pas sans rappeler le ton habituel à Chrétien de Troyes.
The author’s fondness for certain picturesque details is not unlike a practice that we usually associate with Chrétien de Troyes.
What Zumthor omits to mention is the innovative, indeed unique, amalgamthat the Guillaume poet contrives to