Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 12:55:10 -0400
From: "Juris G. Lidaka" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: (fwd) Exempla to sermons
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Being in a rush this Monday afternoon, I'll do this the slothful
way by quoting & replying swiftly.
> 1. What is the manuscript evidence for the original exemplum? Would
> there be manuscripts right down to the fifteenth century? Was that
> particular exemplum incorporated in later collections not in Tubach?
> These are indexed by J. Berlioz and M. A. Polo de Beaulieu et al.,
> *L'exemplum medieval. Introduction a la recherche suivie des tables
> critiques de l'Index exemplorum de F. C. Tubach* (Carcassonne:
> Garae/Hesiode, 1992).
The short answer is that I don't know. The long answer is that
the exemplum appears in various forms in the editions I've seen, and I
haven't bothered with MSS of those texts when I looked at the editions.
I've been casting about for other exempla collections, but I ought to
note that Berlioz & Polo de Beaulieu do *not* really go outside Tubach, as
the title of their book indicates. But from Etienne de Bourbon (mid-xiii
s.) to the Alphabetum narrationum (early xiv s.) and its translation into
Middle English (early xv s.) and on to Johannes Herolt (late xv s.),
there is a pretty continuous tradition.
Various of its features may get separated out for other uses,
too--I'm thinking of Herbert's summary of BL Add. 33,956 (s .xiv), which I
haven't seen (the BL keeps not responding to my requests about
microfilm), with tales 19, 20, & 22 all having various elements of what I
see in the poetic version.
>
> 2. How popular was your 'popular version'? I mean, what can we assume
> about the author and about the audience envisaged? Wouldn't it be
> possible that a religious person or someone other with access to an
> exempla collection adapted this one for a vernacular verse version?
> Who owned the manuscript you found it in?
My Middle English verse version appears in 3 MSS: Ashmole 61 and
CUL Ff.5.48 are both typically mid-xv one-volume libraries of apparently
middle-class instruction, morality, & entertainment; and Rawlinson poetry
118 is Capgrave's Life of St. Katherine with 3 other works added at the
end, all in verse. I'm very unsure of the original provenance of these,
but the language is clustered around Ely, NE Leicestershire, & Derbyshire.
Then there's also the play fragment Dux Moraud, with just some of the
father's lines on a roll from Norfolk & Suffolk, which comes about a
century before Dux Moraud was written on it.
These are obviously clustered chronologically and pretty much
geographically, and I'd add that the verse texts vary in a way that
strikes me as indicating that they somehow come from an oral tradition:
quite often the wording changes enough to show that the rhyme scheme and
content are being adhered to, but the precise wording is less important.
Finally, I'll add this: the Rawlinson text places the events in
"gyane" and the Cambridge in "wyan," meaning Guienne (I can't spell
today; the Ashmole text lacks the stanza); some of the exempla versions
put it in Spain, which is close; and Herbert hypothesizes that source for
the stories in BL Add 33,956 was "a collection by a Franciscan who lived
chiefly in Gascony or Guienne."
Juris
Juris G. Lidaka
WVSC Box 57
PO Box 1000
Institute, WV 25112-1000
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