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Full Screen View THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OLD FRENCH MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE FOR SEEKING ALL SOURCES OF THE ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE by Nathaniel Co gswell Balis A Thesis Submitted t o the Faculty of The Schmidt Co llege o f Arts and Humanities i n Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master o f Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida Augus t 1994 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OLD FRENCH MANUSCRIPT EVIDENCE FOR SEEKING ALL SOURCES OF THE ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE by Nathaniel Co gswell Balis This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candid- ate's thesis adv isor, Dr. Nancy Vine Durling, Department o f Languages and Linguistics, and has been approved by the members o f his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. TK~Advisor (2~QG£f2 ·. .. '·~~~~~~~----~--G airperson, Department~---- --­ o Languages and Linguistics ~ru~du:& \( \0~ chmidt College Human i ties dies Date ii ABSTRACT Author: Nathaniel Cogswell Balis Title: The Significance of Old French Manuscript Evidence for Seeking All Sources of The Romaunt of the Rose Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Nancy Vine Durling Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1994 The search for all sources of The Romaunt of the Rose, the fourteenth-century English version of Le roman de la Rose, focuses on Geoffrey Chaucer. The authorship contro­ versy is so divisive that prominent medievalists like Huot, Hult, Robertson, and Badel write long volumes on the Roman's influence without mentioning the Romaunt. Comparing Geiss­ man's list of rime-borrowings with both poems' concordances is the only way to end the debate, because Chaucer is the likeliest author and one must start with the most compatible French and English texts. At present, the best way to test Geoffrey Chaucer's authorship of the Middle English Romaunt is through close examination of the French rime-borrowings most orthoepically comparable in both languages that the Middle English writer occasionally chose to translate rather than borrow. This selective borrowing suggests the trans­ lator's attempt to bring each term slowly into the English mainstream, by using it at first only in its literal sense. iii Table of Contents Part I: Scholarship on Classifying Roman Manuscripts ....... 1 Part II: Comparative Efforts to Conflate OF Versions ....... 9 Part III: Parallel Texts Guiding Authorship Searches ...... 13 Part IV: Comparing the Romaunt with Possible Sources ...... 17 Part V: Scholarship Seeking the Romaunt's Authorship ...... 34 Appendices Appendix A: Geissman's Facultative Rime-Borrowings ........ 36 Appendix B: Courtly Rime-Borrowings from Appendix A ....... 39 Appendix C: Worldly Rime-Borrowings from Appendix A ....... 40 Notes ..................................................... 42 Works Cited ............................................... 44 Part I: Scholarship on Classifying Roman Manuscripts The first problem in identifying the author of the Mid­ dle English translation of Le roman de la rose is choosing an authentic Romaunt text to contrast with possible sources. There remains only one manuscript for scholars to compare with William Thynne's 1532 edition, whose source might have been another manuscript that has since vanished. An obsta­ cle in seeking the best reading(s) is the editors' need to cite the exact words inspiring the translators' imitations. Ernest Langlois, in his 1910 edition of the Roman, be­ gins the task of classifying texts David describes as "116 of the oldest French MSS" (666). Langlois uses only MSS he considers chronologically closest to "le ms. primitif," but Sutherland notes "more-than-300 existing Roman codices" (v). Sutherland reports that Langlois spent "many years of his life" studying, cataloguing, and classifying Roman manu­ scripts, rejecting many as too recent, late, or new (xiv). Preparing his French Parallel Text sixty years later, Sutherland makes a composite Roman using just one criterion: readings that "most closely correspond to the Middle-English translation" (v). The important difference between the two authors' aims is that Langlois seeks all the sources of the Roman, where Sutherland examines only the process of trans­ lation into Middle English. Chaucer used one or more prob­ ly new manuscripts, possibly combining very different scrib­ al traditions, and the success of his translation must have been as important to him as its accuracy, so Sutherland's two texts must both vary greatly from Langlois's edition. David condemns what he calls "Sutherland's faith in the purity of the MS tradition, his belief that MSS can be clas­ sified into more or less homogeneous families" (669). Even so, David insists that "any contribution made by the edition is owing to its French text" (667). His reason for praising the Parallel-Text Edition's Roman is that Sutherland pro­ v ides readings he derives from Roman codices to "shed light on the translation" (667). The main purpose of Sutherland's edition was to illuminate the way in which Chaucer prepared the translation for his readers' appreciation and enjoyment. The term translation had many applications in medieval texts. As Nancy Durling relates, in early Old French texts the etymon translater could indicate "translation into the vernacular" (14) by modernizing Latin classics into one of Latin's contemporary daughter languages, such as Old French. The Old French infinitive translater came from the Latin past participle translatus, meaning literally any material that someone had brought past any boundaries, such as lan­ guage barriers, restricting its accessibility. Therefore, translater meant to reveal its objects as items that their translator had brought past their previous obscurity. Dur­ ling notes that Geoffrey of Monmouth, in a sentence claiming his own work will transferre ("translate," the Latin infi­ nitive of translatus ) another writer's Old English text into Latin, "claims the freedom to change or transform the rhe­ torical style of the work" (18). Wace, whose source for his "translation" in his poem Le Roman de Brut remains obscure, also demands "the right to modify the matiere itself" ( 19). 2 The ability to translate effectively requires familiar­ ity with voluminous and various contextual source materials, necessary for producing any type of text. Geoffrey of Mon­ mouth, for example, to validate his own work, tries to show that his own Anglo-Norman "oral tradition can be authentic and, once it has been transcribed into a book, can contri­ bute to authoritative history" (Durling 17). Wace also in­ sists on the necessity of ''interpretation" (22), that is, on comparison within various contexts, of material that one in­ tends to translate, providing more comprehensive insights. The instances of Wace and Geoffrey of Monmouth reveal a variance between continental and insular methods of transla­ tion. The European translators were recreating material whose deceptive lexical similarities with texts in their own first languages required extremely cautious translations. The major risk in their work may have been an excessive zeal to understand their sources' intentions, which could occur whenever they encountered any term whose meaning had shifted at all while it persisted in their own languages. English translators had the exact opposite problem: until Chaucer's era, their work, like Geoffrey of Monmouth's, almost always required comparisons between two very different languages. The Norman Conquest had eliminated nearly everyone's inter­ est in Old English literature: in fact, very few people could understand it at all by the fourteenth century because the French influence had made English a whole new language. Clerics and other literati thought so little of English that two of Gower's three major poems are in foreign languages. 3 The risk, then, for English readers, was in perceiving the texts that they translated as linguistically altogether alien to their work. Though continental translators mecha­ nically ignored any apparent similarity between sources' terms and their own, insular translators had to use their imaginations adroitly to unite their two informing cultures. Therefore, Geoffrey of Monmouth recognizes that he must use Latin to attain the continental acclaim that his work's suc­ cess requires, but Wace rejects the Latin idiom though he knows that his French style will affect his text's meaning. Steiner explains that medieval writers often imply the idea that an "interpreter" can also mean a "translator" (28). 1 Interpretation, whether it seeks differences or similarities between cultures, draws on knowledge from many sources; through comparison, writers and readers clarify their texts. Labeling this type of conflation "internal translation," Steiner further indicates that "When we read or hear any language-statement from the past, be it Leviticus or last year's bestseller, we translate" (28). Comprehension as translation means applying previous values and postulates to interpretations. Translation thus becomes a search for au­ thority as first audiences perceived it in the text, but at the same time interpretations bring translators' ideas into MS traditions. Alfred Foulet and Mary Speer ask critics to read e ven the manuscript interpretively: "the editor should envisage translating it into English or Modern French. for the purpose o f controlling the logical flow" (58). Ed­ iting , like close readi ng, is also a kind of translation. 4 Chaucer himself
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