Thursday 16th March 14:15—15:45, Session 2
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| Overview of programme | ||||||
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Session: |
Authors and Readers 4 |
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Place: |
Seminarraum 2 |
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Moderator: |
Takami Matsuda |
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Paper 1: |
Vernacular Death: Richard Rolle and the Authorship of the Lessouns of Dirige |
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Paper 2: |
Early Reader’s Responses to the English Translations of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vite |
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Paper 3: |
Visionary Romance or Chivalric Vision? Late Medieval Taste in Visions of the Afterlife |
Vernacular Death: Richard Rolle and the Authorship of the Lessouns of Dirige
Andrew B. Kraebel
In 1990, Henry Hargreaves announced his discovery that the Middle English translation of materials related to the Office of the Dead in Aberdeen University Library MS 243 included a previously unidentified vernacular commentary on the passages from Job used as Office lections––a commentary that, Hargreaves claimed, was by Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole (d. 1349).[1] Hargreaves was careful to maintain that this text is not a translation of the Hermit’s Latin commentary on the same material, the Exposicio super novem lecciones mortuorum. Instead, though it is largely derived from Gregory’s Moralia on Job, Hargreaves claimed that its Gregorian borrowings match a catena of quotations from the Moralia printed among Rolle’s works in the 1536 Faber edition. No surviving manuscript copy of this catena has been identified, but Hargreaves posited that Rolle created the collection of excerpts in preparation for writing his own commentaries on Job, in Latin and (now) English. Based largely on Hargreaves’s arguments, Ralph Hanna supported the authenticity of this text, the Lessouns of Dirige, including it in his edition of Rolle’s previously Uncollected Prose and Verse (EETS os 239).
It is undoubtedly appealing to think that, just as he prepared his English Psalter in order to make the devotional-exegetical material of his Latin Psalter accessible to a different readership, Rolle could have done the same with his interpretations of the Lessons of the Dead. However, more careful work with the various Latin texts, as well as with the Aberdeen manuscript, reveals that the arguments for the authenticity of the Lessouns are remarkably weak. As my paper will show, there is no reason to believe that the Faber catena has anything to do with Rolle: even if the catena were the immediate source for the Lessouns (and, as I will show, there is reason to doubt Hargreaves on this point), the catena has virtually no overlap with the Gregorian materials used in Rolle’s authentic Latin Exposicio on the Job lections. Instead, like other spurious materials in the Aberdeen manuscript, it seems most likely that Lessouns is the work of one of Rolle’s readers, meant to imitate the Hermit’s authentic writings and to provide a vernacular commentary on Job that could plausibly fit in among Rolle’s other English works––the sort of thing that Rolle would have written if he had undertaken an English gloss of this biblical-liturgical text.
My aim in arguing against the authenticity of the Lessouns of Dirige, then, is not simply to define a slightly smaller canon of the Hermit’s writings. Though it is unlikely to be by Rolle, Lessouns provides a useful illustration of the ways in which the theories of authorship current in the later Middle Ages allowed readers and translators to play with the boundaries of an established authorial persona. In keeping with the theme of the conference, my argument suggests that translators could be inventive readers not only of the works they rendered in new languages, but also of the authorial corpora in which their translations could plausibly be situated.
[1] Hargreaves, “‘Lessons of Dirige’: A Rolle Text Discovered,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 91 (1990): 511-19.
Early Reader’s Responses to the English Translations of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vite
Tamás Karáth
The seven independent English translations of Richard Rolle’s (d. 1349) Emendatio vite (EV) provide numerous instances for the translators’ anticipating and shaping reader’s expectations. In my previous talk at the 2013 Medieval Translator Conference in Leuven, I identified new discourses emerging from the fifteenth-century translations. These discourses evince theological speculations of salvation, as well as a keen interest in reshaping Rolle’s lay contemplative model. But whether the late medieval readers of the translations were perceptive of the new emphases is perhaps of even more significance to the study of the transformation of Rolle’s authority due to the editorial activity of the translators. This paper will discuss the discrepancies between the translators’ and the readers’ interests.
The manuscript contexts of the English EV allow us to reconstruct rich details of the dissemination of the manuscripts that reached a variety of readers over the 15th century, both lay and clergy. A unique case is the Version F translation in MS Worcester Cathedral Library F 172, which reflects the collective zeal and personal curiosity of the compiler-translator without the apparent intention of communicating with an audience.
While we have a clear idea of readers who may have read the EV translations, the actual readers are much more elusive. Four versions of the English EV survive with late medieval readers’ marginal notes that range from sporadic signs and key-word notes (Version B) to dense annotations by multiple readers (Richard Misyn’s translation in MS BL, Add. 37790). Hugh Kempster and Marleen Cré did valuable research on the reader’s profiles attested by the Version A manuscripts and by the Carthusian MS Add 37790, respectively. I will focus on readers’ responses to the Version B text (MSS Cambridge University Library, Ff.5.40 and BL, Harley 2406) and to the Version E text (MS BL, Lansdowne 455). Also taking Cré’s and Kempster’s findings into account, I will contrast the translators’ editorial endeavours with their readers’ appreciations.
Visionary Romance or Chivalric Vision? Late Medieval Taste in Visions of the Afterlife
Sebastian Kleinschmidt
Visions of the afterlife were a popular religious genre all over Europe throughout the Middle Ages, even though they were often disregarded by medieval theologians and written in a simple or uninspiring style as many modern scholars observe. This does not only pertain to the Latin versions but also to their vernacular translations. While most research has focused on the former and their literary and religious motifs, vernacular translations have not received as much interest. When they are considered, their success in being faithful to the Latin ‘originals’ is usually evaluated rather than their success in being faithful to a contemporary audience as these translations were usually made centuries later. This paper specifically addresses the influence of the audience – not only readers or listeners but also the scribes translating them – on the translation process of the two Middle English visions Sir Owain (also known as Saint Patrick’s Purgatory) and The Vision of Tundale, both translations of the two most popular Latin visions of the afterlife, through a close pragma-narratological reading (following Eva von Contzen) as well as an analysis of their contextualisation in their respective manuscripts. While the former helps finding internal evidence for an intended audience and the vision’s explicit and implicit utilisation in lay piety, the latter will shed a glimpse on the actual usage of these visions and the taste of the readership. I will argue that the audience’s interest in romances, in context of this paper e.g. indicated by the fact that versions of both respective visions are found alongside Middle English romances (e.g. in NLS MS Advocates 19.2.1 (so-called ‘Auchinleck’ manuscript) and 19.3.1), has influenced these visions not only on a stylistic level but also with regards to the structure of the narratives and their salvific message. These alterations are not mere embellishments imposed on both texts to capture an audience as has been argued before; they make a re-utilisation these visions possible and fill them with a new meaning and purpose. Thus, it will be my argument that both Sir Owain and The Vision of Tundale have become hybrids of adventurous romances and pious visions.