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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 In-Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]> Message-ID: <Pine.VMS.3.91-2 (vms)[log in to unmask]> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%