medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture

thought this might be of interest to someone here.

(nota Bennies: long posts like this will probably not be permitted, once the
List transfers from Jiscmail to Twitter.)

c

------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:50:56 AM EST
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TMR 12.01.15 Wogan Brown and Fenster, The Life of Saint Alban
(Koopmans)

Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn and Thelma S. Fenster, ed. and trans. <i>The
Life of Saint Alban by Matthew Paris. With the Passion of Saint Alban
by William of St. Albans, trans. by Thomas O'Donnell and Margaret
Lamont, and Studies of the Manuscript by Christopher Baswell and
Patricia Quinn</i>.  The French of England Translation Series (FRETS),
vol. 2.  Tempe, AZ:  Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, 2010.  Pp. xv, 224.  $45/GBP28.  ISBN: 978-0-86698-390-7.

   Reviewed by Rachel Koopmans
        York University
        [log in to unmask]


Matthew Paris (d.1259), best known as a chronicler and author of the
<i>Chronica Majora</i>, was also the author of four saints' lives in
French verse.  The subjects of these vitae were Edward the Confessor
(d.1066), Thomas Becket (d.1170), Edmund of Canterbury (d.1240), and
Alban, the "protomartyr of the English," in Paris's words, and the
major saint of Paris's own monastery of St Albans.  Paris's <i>La Vie
de seint Auban</i>, composed between 1230-1250, has never before been
translated into English.  This fascinating text will interest students
of the Crusades, lay piety, Christian instruction, violence, and
medieval conceptions of the past as well as scholars of hagiography,
manuscript illumination, and French verse.  It is very much worthy of
the attention given to it by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Thelma Fenster
in this fine volume, the second in the French of England Translation
Series [FRETS] published by the Arizona Center for Medieval and
Renaissance Studies.

Paris's <i>Alban</i> survives in a single manuscript, Dublin, Trinity
College MS. 177 (formerly E.I.40).  This manuscript was illustrated
and largely written by Paris himself, and Wogan-Browne and Fenster
repeatedly speak of its digitization as a desiderata.  Made up of
scrappy parchment and "surprisingly small" in size, the Dublin
manuscript was likely meant as a prototype for a fair copy (18).  In
the later medieval period, it was shown to important guests at St
Albans, kept on the high altar, and served as "an embodiment of the
house's identity" (17).  Paris's <i>Alban</i> is the manuscript's
longest text.  It also sports a series of fifty-four illustrations
drawn by Paris (eight more were once present but are now lost),
Paris's French rubrics to these illustrations, William of St. Alban's
<i>Passio sancti Albani</i> (the key source for Paris's rendition of
Alban's life), Ralph of Dunstable's <i>Vita metrica sancti Albani</i>,
charters purportedly from Offa and Ecgfrid concerning the foundation
of St Albans, and liturgical texts, miracle stories and treatises on
the inventions and translations of Alban and Amphibalus.

Wogan-Browne and Fenster's translation of Paris's <i>Alban</i> is
something of a companion volume to their translation of another of
Paris's French saints' lives, his <i>Estoire de seint Aedward le
rei</i>, or <i>The History of Edward the King</i>, published as the
first FRETS volume in 2008.  Like <i>Alban</i>, Paris's life of Edward
the Confessor also survives in a single, illustrated manuscript with
French rubrics, though in the case of this manuscript, the
illustrations were not drawn by Paris himself.  In both FRETS volumes,
Wogan-Browne and Fenster provide a very substantial introduction to
Paris's vitae, a helpful list of suggested further readings, and then
a lively prose translation of Paris's verse.  The volumes also feature
English translations of the French rubrics to the illustrations,
appendices with selected passages from the original French verse,
detailed endnotes, and indices of proper names.  The 2010 volume on
Paris's <i>Alban</i> has in addition a very welcome inset of 16 color
plates, an English translation of William of St. Albans' <i>Passio</i>
by Thomas O'Donnell and Margaret Lamont, and two essays on the Dublin
manuscript by Christopher Baswell and Patricia Quinn.  These additions
result in a collaborative volume drawing on the energies and talents
of six scholars, a volume that succeeds not just in providing the
first English translations and excellent introductions to two
important saints' lives, but also in defining the significance of the
Dublin manuscript and Paris's <i>Alban</i> as "the capstone of the
later twelfth- and thirteenth-century reinventions and developments of
St. Alban's patron saint" (14).

Bede composed the first known account of Alban's conversion and
martyrdom as part of his <i>Ecclesiastical History</i>, but it was
William of St. Albans <i>Passio sancti Albani</i>, composed during the
abbacy of Simon (1167-83), that became the most widely circulated and
utilized account of Alban's life.  In addition to serving as Ralph of
Dunstable's and Paris's principal source, William's <i>Passio</i> was
also the basis for Alban's vita in the <i>Gilte Legende</i>, John of
Tynemouth's compilation of saints' lives printed as <i>Nova legenda
Angliae</i>, and John Lydgate's account of the lives of Alban and
Amphibalus.  O'Donnell and Lamont's translation of William's text is
based on the <i>Acta Sanctorum</i> edition.  In their introduction,
they speak of "William's remarkable historical imagination" in
constructing the complex narrative layers of the text, creating a
pagan, pre-conversion English narrator, expanding and elaborating the
story of Amphibalus (whose relics were invented and translated to St.
Albans in 1178), and for the "strange, almost superfluous violence at
the work's end" (135 and 164-65, n. 56).  This is a vita worth
reading.  Considering that it was much more widely known than Paris's
<i>Alban</i>, and that Paris himself placed it before his own work in
the Dublin manuscript, it may have made sense to put the translation
of William's <i>Passio</i> first in this volume as well.

Paris's account of Alban's life is about twice the length of William's
<i>Passio</i>.  Wogan-Browne and Fenster note that Paris "closely
follows" the <i>Passio</i>, "in that he includes all its narrative
events," but that he "nevertheless produces a work of completely
different tonality and effect" (51).  In their introduction to the
text, Wogan-Browne and Fenster provide an excellent and well-footnoted
summary of Paris's career, the story of Alban, the Dublin manuscript,
and the city and monastery of St. Albans.  They discuss how Paris
further amplified the story of Amphibalus, and how he gave a name,
Heraclius, and a much expanded role to the unnamed solider who defends
Alban in William's <i>Passio</i>.  The "most startling" narrative
change made by Paris, though, was his decision to make the story's
narrator a Saracen (27).  The first folio or two of Paris's
<i>Alban</i> is unfortunately lost, so we do not have Paris' preface
to the text (if there was one), but in the conclusion of the vita the
narrator states, "I, who was at that time a Saracen of false belief,
saw the beginning and end of this story...I have recorded these events
on parchment as I saw them...In Rome I will seek baptism with a true
and sincere heart" (103).  This change of narrators, in Wogan-Browne
and Fenster's words, "offers reassurance to the poem's audiences in
their own time of the efficacy of the Christian narrative, of its
power to convert and effect change in the world," a message with
obvious appeal to elite audiences at the time of the Crusades (28).
Wogan-Browne and Fenster also point out that Paris's development of
the story of Heraclius resulted in "a chivalric figure of outreach to
lay patrons" (30, n.72).  They note that "Paris's illustrations and
his French captions for them continue beyond the end of the vernacular
text" of <i>Alban</i>, suggesting that the Latin charters in the
Dublin manuscript, too, were "envisaged as a continuous part of what
could be exhibited and read aloud to potential patrons" (18).  On the
second flyleaf of the Dublin manuscript, Paris made notes concerning
the circulation of his saints' lives among contemporary noblewomen,
and Wogan-Browne and Fenster devote a section of their introduction to
"women readers" of his saints' lives (32-35).

Other themes Wogan-Browne and Fenster discuss in their introduction
include lordship and Alban's elevated social status, conversion and
the Jews, the emphasis on and importance of blood in <i>Alban</i>,
anxiety about unburied bodies on the battlefield, and the stress
placed on the cross given to Alban by Amphibalus.  This cross, which
becomes stained with Alban's blood at his martyrdom, is featured in
both the text and Paris's illustrations.  It acts, like Henry III's
Holy Blood relic, as "an icon of holy violence, crusading vengeance,
and intense piety" (39).  Wogan-Browne and Fenster also describe
Paris's use of monorhymed laisses, the variation and flexibility of
the syllable count in individual lines of the poem, Paris's flair for
enjambement, and his use of rhyme, in which characteristic "French of
England" traits are evident.  In a lengthy final section on Matthew
Paris's "style and treatment of the source," Wogan-Browne and Fenster
discuss Paris's use of direct speech, the contrasts he draws between
noise and heat and quiet and peaceful darkness, his use of animal
similes, and his transposition of Alban's life "into the shared keys
of vernacular and Latin crusade and chanson de geste narrative" (56).
This reviewer would have liked more discussion of <i>Alban</i> in the
context of Paris's other French verse vitae, particularly <i>The
History of Edward the King</i>, but perhaps this must wait for further
research on Paris's other work.

Wogan-Browne and Fenster describe the Dublin manuscript as "a
multimedia compilation, which would have allowed for a range of uses
and literacies" (17), and it was a wise decision to include two
additional essays on the manuscript in this volume.  In his essay on
"the manuscript context," Christopher Baswell emphasizes that the
Dublin manuscript was an improvisational work with "evolving form and
intentions" that appears to have been produced over a fairly lengthy
period of time (173).  As support for this argument, he points to
evidence that illustrations were placed on the page before the text
was written, that rubrics were awkwardly placed under, around, or even
inside illustrations, and that an inventio narrative is strangely
interrupted for the insertion of charters--a mistake, Baswell
believes, of one of Paris's assistant scribes.  Like Wogan-Browne and
Fenster, Baswell will not commit to a tight or specific date range for
the manuscript's production.  Perhaps the most interesting observation
in this essay concerns the coherence of the illustrations in the
manuscript.  Baswell writes that repeated motifs in these
illustrations "serve to draw together moments across the manuscript
that have no close narrative or chronological connection" (188); he
also notes the illustrations' stress on Heraclius (189-90).  Patricia
Quinn makes further observations on the Dublin manuscript's collation,
quiring, and parchment quality, noting that too heavy dependence on M.
R. James' collotype facsimile of the manuscript, published in 1924,
has been responsible for some difficulties and lacunae in subsequent
analyses.  Quinn's essay includes a helpful reconstruction of the
manuscript's marginal notes (202-3) and an appendix comparing the
present collation with a conjectured original collation of the
manuscript.  The first four color illustrations in the volume's inset
are keyed, strangely, to Quinn's essay, which is the last item in the
volume.  These illustrations are inexplicably numbered as "3B.1-3B.4."
"Plates 1-12," which follow, are keyed to Baswell's essay.  It would
have been better to number these illustrations as Plates 1-16 and for
Baswell and Quinn to have worked more closely together, but the
inclusion of these essays and illustrations nevertheless enhances the
value of the volume.

Wogan-Browne and Fenster's <i>The Life of Saint Alban</i> will surely
stimulate further study of the two texts translated in the volume, the
manuscript that preserves them, and the extraordinary monk who
composed Alban's life in French verse and created and illustrated the
Dublin manuscript.  The volume is relatively inexpensive and could be
very profitably used in undergraduate and graduate courses.  Wogan-
Browne and Fenster's efforts have made <i>Alban</i>, "as original as
any of Paris's highly individual and uncategorizable works" (58),
accessible to a new audience.

**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html