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 uses the term translate in various
ways. He uses the word only twice in its oldest and most
literal sense "transfer," first citing money "translated
into other folk" (Bo.2. p.5 20-5), and the second time indi
cating a CT heroine, Griselde, "Whan she translated was in
swich richesse" [IV (E) 385]. Chaucer names some of his own
translations in LGW (329, 425), and in his retracciouns end
ing CT (1085). Geissman writes of these, "The works he him
self referred to as translations are precisely those which
display the constant striving after literalness" (256).
R. A. Shoaf, writing on "Chaucer's Poetics of Transla
tion," notes that Chaucer used four languages, but insists
that "the language he [Chaucer] was actually translating"
was "the language of the past with its numerous vocabulary
of literary conventions, ranging from motifs (dreams) to
puns ( 'venerie' )" (55). Shoaf wants critics to read Chaucer
for "his attitude to the past-ness of language itself" (56).
He cites Chaucer's metaphor, from the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women (66-80), and from The Parlement of Foules (22-
25), for the creation of new art from old works by eliciting resurgent grain from the sites of previous harvests (57).
Shoaf notes that lands become fertile again "only because the old fields are plowed under season Qv season" (57).
Because Chaucer colonizes his predecessors' territory, Shoaf encourages critics to seek "Chaucer's understanding of the violation which 'plowing the field' evokes" (57). The God of Love's reproach of Chaucer for inhibiting lovers' devo tion to Love, in LGW Prol. F 31 7-2 7, by his "trans lacioun"
5 (24), suggests to Shoaf that translation is the rejuvenating
"violation" for Chaucer's informing texts (57). For Shoaf,
"To translate violates an authority" (58), especially that of "conventions that confused vox and res" (64), meaning any traditions presuming to understand, much less convey, those matters (res) they cited by means of their discourse (vox).
Chaucer obligatorily changes his informants' intentions, de spite his best efforts to the contrary, because, as Shoaf notes, "if he had merely repeated the prior 'sentence [mean ing],' it would have manifestly differed because of its dif ferent, new context" (66). Similarly, when Chaucer borrows his sources' terms, although they partly convey their older meanings, they develop new senses in new diverging contexts.
The only way Chaucer can develop an interest among his hearers for the classical texts he commends to their atten tion is by promoting familiarity with his sources' terms themselves. Chaucer's borrowings in translations help those readers who have previously enjoyed reading classics but now feel that too much of the vocabulary necessary for reading them has escaped their memory. The borrowings also suggest to Chaucer's primary, aristocratic audience that promoting rapports among English and French discourses could be easier than they have previously suspected. Even so, to accomp lish these significant projects, Chaucer must "violate" the terms he enlists for both purposes, in the sense that he de prives his English colleagues, and perhaps some patrons too, of his borrowings' subtler connotations. To let the words persist in English, as nearly all Chaucer's borrowings do,
6 Chaucer must use different terms to represent the same Old
French words at different places in the translation. When
Old French terms appear in their newer, metaphorical senses,
Chaucer discreetly replaces them with English words. Even the best new editions of Old French manuscripts will mislead their readers about the terms Chaucer borrowed, because ed itors use the oldest sources and Chaucer used more recent manuscripts. The only useful comparative resources are the parallel texts, like those that Sutherland has compiled most recently, because only they show Chaucer's possible sources.
For modern editors, establishing parallel texts for medieval translations differs greatly from seeking lost
"originals,'' because parallel-text editors attempt to elu cidate their medieval translators' ideas about translation.
All literature is translation in the sense that each text is a compendium of materials from many different sources that its author combines into more innovative forms suitable to his or her own culture. Recent scholars prefer Guillaume de Lorris's first Roman to the even more eclectic Romaunt, which they apparently find confusing in its vast diversity.
David Hult cautiously attempts ''to propose that Guillaume's poem is a finished work ... consistent with stylistic and narrative standards as well as medieval poetic traditions"
(6). The determination to prove that Guillaume's Roman is absolutely complete and uniform throughout has necessitated rigorous ongoing scho larship to classify all the manuscripts chronologically and thus to compile the most authentic ver- sion possible of the Roman manuscript. This conflation is
7 almost as elusive today as it was when Langlois began his classifications so long ago. The lack of a definitive Roman source for the Romaunt gives medievalists more reasons for their silence about the Romaunt. Blodgett's insistence that
Thynne used the Glasgow MS as his Romaunt source-text (139), a claim that completely satisfies Feng (6), and that should end the long Romaunt textual debate, has had little effect.
Scholars' reticence to mention the Middle English transla- tion probably results from disputes about its authorship.
Most scholars now believe that Chaucer wrote the A-Fragment.
Critics should at last transcend this long debate, because
Sutherland's edition proposes two definitive source-texts.
Elusive sources and the authorship debate have brought more attention to the Roman; scholars must review Roman textual information to clarify these two major Romaunt disputations.
Attempts to classify Roman manuscripts are almost as futile as attempts to recreate the "original" manuscript, but there is a way to use Roman manuscript evidence to disclose valuable information about the Romaunt's various sources.
The Roman manuscript readings that most closely resemble a conflation of the 1532 Romaunt (which might be an edition of a lost manuscript) and the only extant (Glasgow) Romaunt manuscript, can reveal and clarify the translation process.
Although these later readings often reflect scribal emenda- tions, their sources might be better than some older MSS.
In any event, they are Romaunt sources: Huot notes each
Roman MS's unique "integrity" a s a "literary text" by writ-
') e rs e arning p l aces "among t he poets of the Rose" (1 993: 4 ) . ""
8 Part II: Comparative Efforts to Conflate OF Versions
Sutherland's edition represents the most recent and the
most rigorous scholarship in this area, as even David, his
very exacting critic, suggests when writing that its only
value lies in the comparison it offers of Roman source-texts
(667). Even so, Sutherland's introduction specifically in
dicates that he uses only three manuscripts, two from the
same family (xxii). David nearly admits Sutherland's merit
and the need for Sutherland's criterion for readings in both
texts when he states that "Sutherland has identified several
variants of these MSS" (667) with bearings on the Romaunt.
(The "MSS" are clearly the Old French MSS, because only one
Middle English MS remains.) Sutherland's only reason for
comparing any of the Old French manuscripts with the Middle
English version is to explain the ME author's methods; this
approach makes his result differ profoundly from Langlois's.
Sutherland chooses Roman readings that best resemble
those from the Romaunt (v); that exclusivity necessarily ge
nerates a Roman text supplementing only Romaunt scholarship.
Of all Roman texts, Sutherland's is least likely to give any
insight about the Roman (such as Guillaume's identity and
his intentions), because Chaucer almost certainly used newer
texts, the older MSS already residing in private libraries.
In any event, as Huot and Hult agree, of Guillaume "we can
know nothing" (2); Huot notes Dragonetti's idea that de Lor
ris could be "only a fiction created by Jean de Meun" (2).
As Pierre-Yves Badel tersely states, "Ce qu'on sait de Guil
laume de Lorris tient tout dans les vers centraux du Roman
9 (v. 10495-666) que Jean de Meun fait dire par Amour" (20)
[What we know of Guillaume de Lorris depends entirely on the central lines of the Roman (11. 10495-666) that Jean de Meun has
Guillaume de Lorris might be Jean de Meun's metaphor for his own previous poetic voice; they seem to believe that the
Roman de la rose would therefore be even more interesting.
Critics' difficulties with Chaucer as author of the Romaunt might result from the accessiblity of records about Chaucer.
Perhaps if Chaucer's historical identity were as obscure as that of Guillaume de Lorris, and perhaps if he also had evi dently written only this one work, modern readers and modern scholars as well would study the Romaunt much more actively.
Sutherland's Roman text might interest scholars tracing
Roman history or French language history; if OF scholars could agree on the Roman's manuscript history and its ur text, one could see in it a French scribal tradition culmin ating in Roman MSS that were available to Chaucer. Even so, s uc h a Roman wou l d only i nf l ame t he dispute, because later readers would debate scholars' assumptions informing their classification methods and theo ries about the evolution of the manuscripts. Although the poem reveals unique forms of resistance to clerical, courtly, and even a few more mundane
1 0 traditions, some critics would maintain that any committee's text is a compromise neglecting controversies about language evolution, literary style shifts, and metric romance rules.
Sutherland easily conflates a Romaunt text, which David sees as corrupt, ironically silencing scholars on the Romaunt.
Sutherland's Old French Roman text, which is much more speculative but critically more successful than his Romaunt, shows his effort to explain the translation procedure from the Roman to the Romaunt, by presenting a version of each text whose meanings approach the other's as closely as the manuscript evidence permits. Sutherland appropriately bases his Romaunt text, which is his criterion for Roman readings, on the fullest Romaunt manuscript record, the 1532 Thynne edition; for the Roman text, though, choices are more com- plex. In his "Foreword," Sutherland shows that Roman manu- scripts are his exclusive sources for the parallel texts'
"words, lines, and passages which. . most closely corre- spond to the Middle-English translation as we know it" (v).
The process of comparing each language's text to the other's would be as circular as it seems, except that, if Blodgett and Feng are correct in stating that Thynne used the Glasgow manuscript as his edition's source-text, there is really just one referent for confirming the readings in the Roman.
As Sutherland explains, the Thynne edition has some readings that have disappeared from the Glasgow MS (vi), so that it, in comparison with the MS, can solve Romaunt source-debates.
The resulting Old French text can inform French scholarship o nly o n two types o f Roman MSS a vailable in 14th-c. England.
1 1 Sutherland bases his Roman (Fragment A) text on one MS, which scholars designate as Ha, with some readings from two others, He and g (xxii), which are most like the English.
Entirely different MS groups "necessarily" (xxxiv) inform his Old French texts for the last two fragments, a deviation he considers as "a testimony that the Romaunt is probably a combination of two earlier translations" (xxxiv). He states that the first fragment (11. 1-1705) alone among the three parts of the Romaunt, "is Chaucer's" (xxxiv). Here he fol lows prevailing scholarly opinion, which began with Skeat's long analysis of the Romaunt in The Chaucer Canon and his remark that Fragment A is grammatically and orthoepically
(in rhymes) "immaculate" though Band C both err (69). The parallel Roman text must also reflect these differences.
Skeat was joining the continuous authorship debate that had begun in 1868, when Bradshaw, as Robert French observes,
"rejected the Romaunt of the Rose from the canon, largely on the ground of the inferior quality of its rimes" (78). 3
His exclusion occurred before Child stated in 1870 "that the translation might be the work of more than one author" (78).
Child, noting the large section of lines from the Roman that the Romaunt lacks, concluded "that the poet after the break in 5810 (where more than 5,000 lines of the French original are omitted) was better than [the author of] the middle por tion" (78). French states that when Lindner showed that B and C had different authors, Skeat and Kaluza accepted C as pos sibly Chaucer's wo rk (79 ) . Lounsbury felt Chaucer wrote t he full Romaunt, and Koch found it all spurious (79-80).
1 2 Part III: Parallel Texts Guiding Authorship Searches
Sutherland's procedure for determining Romaunt readings includes "collation with the Glasgow Manuscript or with the
French" (vi), creating yet another hybrid text, one like all the manuscripts and editions scholars must use to seek any sources for either text. David criticizes Sutherland's Mid dle English text for its primary reliance "on Thynne's 1532 edition ... instead of the Glasgow MS" (666). David's next sentence summarizes some of Sutherland's reasons for choos ing the Thynne edition as his primary Middle English source:
"The two texts (hereafter Th and G) are remarkably close, and Th makes up for several leaves lost from G and has read ings for a few lines left blank in the MS" (666). David al so pleads Sutherland's cause obliquely in further remarks.
David regards Th as anything but "the faithful copy of a 15th-c. MS" (667) that it should be. He notes that Thynne tries "to make a mediaeval text intelligible" (667) and thus works "to introduce slight changes in orthoepy, grammar, and diction" (667). Sutherland complains that G "is corrupt in many lines" (ix), that it dates from "between 1400 [the year
Chaucer died] and 1440" (ix), so it is a later descendant of Chaucer's MS, and that Thynne "probably" (ix) had another
MS that has vanished. Sutherland writes before Blodgett's observation that "scholars concerned with the poem's textual history ... all agree that his [Thynne's] copy-text must have been very similar toG'' (140) and that "Thynne's text of the Romaunt varies from Gl's in a way that suggests he emended by consulting a copy of the French original rather
1 3 than a second text of the Middle English translation" (139).
Skeat, introducing his Thynne facsimile edition, states that
"the texts of G and Th are so much alike that they must have been copied from the same source" (vii). Blodgett suggests that both reflect a familiarity with OF manuscript evidence.
If Blodgett is right, the Romaunt textual debate ends there.
David sympathizes somewhat with Sutherland's objections to G as a deficient and erroneous source, but he still rates it a bit above Th: "G is no model of Chaucerian or 15th-c. usage, but it is still a safer guide" (667). The "slight changes" (667) disappoint David, despite the "leaves lost" and "lines left blank" (666) that the manuscript reveals.
Sutherland carefully produces a "collation of the Thynne edition with the Glasgow manuscript and all significant emendations in the three most widely known editions of the
Romaunt" (154). He thus ascertains that his Romaunt text is as rigorous and exhaustive as his access to material allows, but it can only imply sources eluding certain recognition.
Even if scholars found autograph manuscripts of both poems, source debates would persist, and conflicts about emendations would last as long as critics read these texts.
Only awareness of the particular process of translation for this unique poem can help scholars seeking the translator's sources, identity, and intentions. The only thorough way to consider the translation process is to analyze a full com pendium of the Old French manuscript sources for the result ing Middle English Roma unt. Sutherland's comparative Roman is much more critically po pular t han his rigorous Romaunt,
14 incurring David's claim that only Sutherland's Roman text is useful (667). 4 Badel notes that "le texte du Roman est un recueil d'autoritts" (495) [the text of the Roman is a col lection of authorities]. Sutherland restates it as a new authority, and he thus performs that same task in preparing each parallel text, using the exact process that the former editors, all the scribes, and both authors use: conflation.
The poets' knowledge and views of their material all depend on their predecessors, because, as Hult remarks in explana tion of the term "Self-Fulfilling Prophecies" in his title,
"perception and knowledge are never innocent, 'objective' faculties, but rather a function of the store of experiences that we have already accumulated" (3). Such "experiences" of other metric romances incited Jean de Meun to assume that
Guillaume's work needed the particular kind of resolution only Jean could provide. Hult suggests that Jean's "reading and interpretation" of the first text, his misconception of the Roman that he received as lacking a conclusion, let the poem succeed by making Jean write its "popular continuation"
(304). Hult finds Jean de Meun's reading of the OF Roman a mere error, suggesting that only Jean's misreading allows the later more successful interpretations by canonizing the original poem. The relative merit of any writer's textual analysis might equally inform the authorship debate if read ers would consider the ramifications of all possibilities.
Either the whole Romaunt is anonymous, precluding, like the
Roman, biographical interpretation, or Chaucer, the likeli est author, wrote a portion informing his more mature wo rk.
1 5 Establishing any work of art's authorship is a process like that of writing in that it requires many comparisons among various sources. Effective writers develop extreme familiarity with several diverse texts informing and inspir ing their work. The only way authors can know their sources well is to develop new viewpoints, regarding all the textu al corpora and conflating these perspectives with the writ ers' unique personalities or identities. Therefore searches for authors and searches for sources of their works require efforts of conflation or composition very similar to the process of writing. Sylvia Huot's insistence on each text's
"integrity" as a work of a writer who deserves a particular standing "among the poets of the Rose" (1993: 4) should also describe Sutherland's modern versions of both works.
If scholars begin accepting the Romaunt as an important poem, they will surely admire its enlargement of the English vocabulary among its other remarkable contributions. This
Middle English text incorporates terms from the OF Roman; it also helps to popularize other terms that very few native
English speakers could yet fathom when Chaucer began writing his poems. Only those aristocrats with the best education, who were the most literate members of Chaucer's first audi ences, already knew some of the Old French terms occurring in the Romaunt. The translator flatters these few listeners and simultaneously educates the rest by presenting each term of this type only in contexts of its o ldest literal meaning.
Hi s brilliance as a linguist and as a stylist appears in his awareness of where to borrow and where to translate them.
16 Part IV: Comparing the Romaunt with Possible Sources
Janice Kaufman's list of the words Chaucer introduces to the English language from his Old French source texts shows Chaucer's nascent awareness of and commitment to the chivalrous and courtly vocabulary and ideology he is learn ing in his work. 5 Appendix A is a selection from Geissman's appendix of rime-words Chaucer borrows for Fragment A, list ing only terms that sound as much like their French etyma as phonology permits and that Chaucer sometimes rejects from his source for the translation. It shows Chaucer's aim to popularize certain new French terms in English gradually, presenting contextual ambiguities as slowly and transparent ly as he can. Appendix A suggests various possible theories about the ways literary borrowings expand cultural lexica.
One way in which poets are able to vary diction is by archaization: the use of terms their hearers barely recall.
Though rarity lends deep color to archaisms, they often have lost poetic connotative diversity, because people generally recall only one possible meaning, if any, for each old term.
Poets often avoid this problem by using their archaisms in new contexts, thereby expanding their potential meanings.
Chaucer's Old French terms flatter the aristocrats' famili arity with French and Latin texts, simultaneously stretching natives ' vocabularies with the prestigious second language.
For both audiences, Chaucer needs discretion in his use of terms whose rare antiquity and English contexts make them seem almost new. Therefore, the terms still awaiting phono logical and paradigmatic diversification are the neologisms.
1 7 Chaucer appropriately starts his literary career with
an attempt to simplify a courtly text by clarifying its chi
valrous assumptions, making its metaphors and similes more
visual and more concrete. As D. W. Robertson observes in
A Preface to Chaucer, "In Guillaume's poem the surface ele- gance. [describing] Oiseuse, Deduit, the God of Love,
and their followers in the garden has been a major hindrance to a modern understanding of his intention" (205). Part of the problem is that Guillaume shows such awareness of his courtly milieu that he can denounce it with very convincing apparent praise. Robertson praises de Lorris's discourse as
"a symbolic technique for a humorous condemnation of evil, presenting his actual materials in the elegant ogees of the prevailing style" while condemning them as "odious" (205).
Levey, citing de Lorris's contemporaries, notes that
"Dante, for example, realized that courtly love was only a stage on a road to something far more profound" (1 ). Clerk ly lore, also, could be a stage leading to terrestrial and thus to celestial courts, as people sought extrapersonal contexts to clarify and amplify their interpersonal encount ers, and only in popular poetry could most people seek them.
Many people believed that divinity answered their prayers by increasing their responsivenss to revelations within nature, thus inspiring human art to direct science and all the other types or forms of wisdom. Nature and great art led people to reconcile themselves to their difficult external condi tions by l oving others , t hus preparing themselves for the universal love that r eligion insisted they should develop.
1 8 Guillaume's work distinguishes with special care among
its author, its narrator, and its protagonist. De Lorris and his narrator must represent their fictional predecessors as facts beyond alteration, which they do by relating the protagonist's education, starting each dialogue with his na
ive statements. As Levey describes the poem's setting, "it is springtime, as we might expect, and the birds are twit tering" (4). Also twittering are the birds' primary disci ples, the love poets. Chaucer must choose terms to reveal the wrongness of the ideas they describe, maintaining the sonorities of the French words within the constraints of
Middle English rhyming iambic tetrameter. He balances these problems with a skill that only major poets ever can obtain, creating a translation that Lounsbury considers, among those
"produced before the present century" as the best "for its close adherence to the original" (II 15). Like all poets, he must replace ephemeral formulae with diverse other terms, though, as Muscatine observes, "standard forms became more prominent in medieval poetry. [and] the colloquial quality. . disappears" ( 2 7). Even so, Eckhardt states, the Romaunt reveals "deviations from courtoisie toward col loquialism" (60). Amid numerous archaisms, Chaucer evolves.
The Oxford English Dictio nary traces all terms from Ap pendix A to Old French, d eriving only pine from an English r oot, suggesting that Old French speakers might have taken pine from Old English. Chaucer implies that it now refers t o another species o f tree in France, because his line reads
"Whiche tree in Fraunce men c al a pyne" (1457). Chaucer has
1 9 other words translating the third and final instance of this word in the Roman (1471 ), apparently because it is so far
from the first two that hearers might imagine English pines.
The first two instances are close enough (1457, 1465) that they will obv iously mean the same tree: the second observes
"Vnder that pyne-tree a wel" (1465). Chaucer suggests for his wealthy patrons the domestication of French pine trees, to make the meanings of the word the same in both languages.
Of the remaining fifteen terms in Appendix A, only six
(Appendix B) are "courtly," which to Chaucer's hearers meant suitable to the aristocrats who controlled the land and its tenants' work. Of the fifteen, only moysoun has lost its
favor with English speakers, evidently because all gatherers preferred Old English names for their jobs though they chose newer Latinisms for their products such as beef and poultry.
They kept faith with colleagues while ennobling their wares.
The "worldly" terms (Appendix C), whose designation on ly means that they lack much affinity with the royal courts, o ffer new "patrician" French garb for old mundane phenomena.
Chaucer's promotion of borrowings indicates that, instead of new ideas, English speakers gai ned new perspectives, mainly about the nature of aristocracy, from the Norman Conquest.
Chaucer's unique v iewpoint on these perspectives will emerge from an analys i s of the contexts where he borrowed the newer r ime-wo rds, c ontras t i ng with t hose wh e re he trans lated them.
The first of the courtly terms , linage, is one that
Chaucer t ranslat e s o nly o nce ( 2 58) , rejecting it the last two times tha t it a ppe ars ( 1130 , 1176) f o r the Old English
20 terms kynne (1152) and sybbe (1199). The contexts differ in that the first instance is general, without citing any par ticular ancestor: QQani el uoit aucun grant linage (246), which Chaucer translates as li she se any great lignage
(258). Chaucer restricts the usage of this relatively new term to the most general contexts, leaving the foreign aris tocrats' descent to the few who can profit from studying it, a group from which, his works suggest, he excludes himself.
The second chivalrous term, maystrye, Chaucer restricts to its observable and obvious usage: Chauciez refu per g£ant mestrise (826), becoming And shode he was with great may strye (842). Whereas linage is provable with chronologies, maystrye is more subject to disputation. Chaucer will admit maystrie only where its manifestation, in this case the shoes, is concrete and thus without doubt. In medieval cul tures, where most people traveled only on foot, general po verty demanded recognizably durable and attractive footwear.
As to whether one should ascribe maystrie to Nature, as in line 1433, semantic arguments, at least, will proliferate.
The third term, plesaunt, Chaucer borrows only for two personifications, Beaute (1015- 1031 ), and C(o)urtesy (1242-
1264) when they serve Amor. The other four instances of plesaunt from the French Roman modify the inanimate entities leu ("place" 117, 1412), seruise (701), and noise (1390).
Plesaunt is the present participle of plaire, from the Latin verb placere ("please"), which Chaucer applies to servants.
The fourth a r j_stocr a t ic t e rm, prouec_g, had t wo m.:~ anings i n Old French : " vasselage ," a q ua ntifiab l e measure of medi -
21 eval nobles' feudal retainer-warriors, and its comparable
allusion to "pride." Chaucer keeps the term from line 249,
Par son sens ou par sa proesce, transferring it into "Or by
his wit or by his prowesse" (261 ). Here the word "wit,"
for the French term sens, where "sense" is the wrong word,
shows Chaucer's mainly English audience he means a skill common only among the few with access to academic prowess.
In its other A-Fragment context, line 277, another
pair of words formulaically appears: Sa prouece au mains, ~
s'anor, but Chaucer rejects both prouece and anor. Transla tion here might seem capricious, because both these terms have English cognates useful enough to persist for the next six centuries ("prowess" and "honor"). The difference rests
in the broader context, where the Roman personifies envy in describing a mural. In the first context, an aristocrat is typically achieving genuine worldly success: thus the next
line states "Of that hath she great heuinesse" [From that, she
[if she
Chaucer translates anor here as "worthynesse," ignoring the term prouesse completely. He chooses an Old English term, v indicating and actualizing "the most noble man" in his ac complishments, thus emphasizing Envy's many proud illusions.
The fifth courtly term, reigne, also occurs in only two lines. The wider context i s another mural, personifying
Pape lardie ( 40 9) , i n Cha ucer ' s c alque Po pe- Ho ly (4 15 ) , wh om
22 both poets, with different spellings, call "hypocrite" in the previous line. The attribution of reiqne in its first appearance, Deu ~ son raine [God and his reign (440)] is be yond question for nearly all the first hearers. The second citation is in line 752 of the Roman, ascribing to the re gion of Lorraine Plus beles notes qu'en nul raigne [More beautiful notes than in any realm]. Chaucer amends all this nationalism, by departing from his general conciliatory stance between his two nurturing cultures: he recreates the line as "Ful swetter than in this countre" [Much sweeter than in this country (768)]. In the Romaunt, as Raymond
Preston observes, Chaucer works "to prune generally descrip tive terms" (22). Here he recognizes that most of his first hearers, if he includes his less courtly constituents, whom he needs to spread his work, have very little experience of any foreign cultures. He has already just mentioned a place that most of his hearers will consider almost otherworldly, and now he must bring his references home as soon as he can.
The sixth and last of the courtly terms, seruyse, Chau cer borrows only twice, rejecting it only once. Seruyse
[service] is an aristocratic term because it requires an au thority demanding obedience. The first two occurrences cite birdsong, inspiring celestial servitude "As angels don espi rituell" [As angels do spiritually (672)]. The third, final instance of seruyse occurs at the dance, where Largesse, who personifies generosity, enthralling les sage~~ les fox [the wise and the fools (1140)] by consignment, renders any oppo nent Son ami 12._ar .§.OTl grant seruise [Her friend by her great
23 service (1145)]. Her practice of buying herself allies with her gifts reveals an irony that has become too subtle for
Chaucer's hearers in contrast with the angelic birds' joyous selflessness. Chaucer here gives a following line spontane ously from his own composition, again with English terms for these two esoteric models: "So large of yeftes and wyse was she" [So free of gifts and
Chaucer's new courtly rime-borrowings in the Romaunt show a determination to expand his language gradually by using French terms where their meanings are most concrete first, before widening their contexts to greater complexity.
He recognizes that his terms' effectiveness in less literal, which means more metaphorical, contexts in French fails to ensure their success in those same contexts in English: the words are simply too new to generalize for most hearers, who must learn the specific meanings before grasping analogies.
His courtly patrons need compensation, but their "worldly"
Saxon subjects, the majority ensuring Chaucer's later fame, must be able to understand the poem. In this way he can attempt a reconciliation between his foreign aristocratic patrons and his Saxon country friends whose language is be coming once again their country's legislative and juridical discourse. He knows that he and all the people in his two cultures who have helped him become a poet will lose too much if they let t heir discords , among which language is the most obvious, lead them into a c ivil war. Only poets with both aristocratic leisure and common suffering can attain the skill and knowledge, let alone the desire, to undertake
24 such forbidding tasks. Chaucer, an apprentice since age
sixteen, still displaying little apparent promise, serving another culture's ruling colonists, must have strong doubts.
Readers who know of his tutelage can hardly avoid wondering
if he has any idea of his potential for greatness in poetry, before receiving patronage or praise, or that he must com promise his views, matter, and voice, much more, to prevail.
The first worldly (i.e. non-courtly) term, asyse, means
literally "seated, sitting" in Old French. It is the past participle of OF asseoir, from the optionally transitive
Latin verb adsedere, suggesting, in its prepositional prefix ad ["towards"], joining some others. Its past participle adsitus indicated subjects' voluntary or compulsory seating.
Chaucer translates this word as "set(te)" (195, 1100, 1434), in subtly satirical lines, borrowing (11. 900, 1237, 1392) this participle from the Roman only for relatively benign and mundane human interventions within nature. The first and third borrowings reveal effects of transplantation, and the second describes the sukkenye that Fra(u)nchise wears.
This medieval garment provides an example of the Roman satirizing chivalry with a subtlety Chaucer might have found elusive for his translation. Caie quotes Ferguson's Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford UP, 1961 ., p. 159), describing the sukkenye as "'a knee-length, pleated tunic with tight sleeves'" ( 322 ). Sleeve-basting to tighten clothing a round the arms was the medieval equiv alent of mod e rn leg-basting, except t hat a thousand years ago mo st peo ple wore b aggy c l othes or b a sted t heir own seams, as does,
25 for example, the Roman's protagonist Amant. He sets out on his search for romance Cousant mes manches £ uidele (89)
["With a
Fra(u)nchise as debonaire (1199- 1220), for showing "pity" when anyone succumbs to her abundant graces (1204- 1225).
Fra(u)nchise's sukkenye prompts Chaucer to borrow the term asyse again, this time where the Roman praises each pointe ("trimming" 1214) on the garment as being par son droit asise (1215), that is "in his [its] right [place] asy se" (1237). Her fastidiousness regarding her attire, like her "pity" for her lovers, threatens to exhaust satirical resources for its expression. Part of the problem is that the protagonist has performed the same fastidious basting ritual. Perhaps, as Caie suggests of Amant, Fra(u)nchise also, in tight clothes, "has figuratively cast off Christ's pure coat without seam, given to everyone at baptism" (322).
Both poets claim that women are more attractive in narrower sleeves than in their alternative garment, the cote (1220-
1242), which Ferguson (159) states is "modest" (Caie 322).
Chaucer translates the three remaining instances of asyse (195, 1100, 1434) with its cognate "set(te)," show ing that the distinction by transitivity and reflexivity among the verbs seat, set , and s it was then still vague.
The first two contexts where Chaucer translates asyse cite more arrogant human interventions; the first describes shock art: a mural of Auarice on a very forb i dding wall in other-
26 wise beautiful natural surroundings (195- 209). The second
(1 100- 1120) mentions a semiprecious carbuncle in the cercle
( 1088- 1108) encompassing the hair of Rychesse ("Wealth"
(1087- 1 107). Both poets denounce this character for having
losyngeours ("liars" 1040- 1056) at her aristocratic court.
The third rendition of asyse by "set(te)" mentions the fon
taine of vanity, Chaucer's artificial "wel" (1434- 1464).
Guillaume's three uses of delitable, the second worldly
term, all indicate the garden and its bounty. At its first
appearance, Chaucer chooses to uphold the garden's, and thus
the poem's, reputation by giving the English cognate of the
Roman's rime-word, which here is "espyrituell" (638- 650).
This choice leaves the translator without a riming cognate
for dilitable, so he instead writes "fayre" (637- 649).
The third worldly rime-borrowing, engyn, appears only twice in the OF Roman: first, when the protagonist seeks an
engyn ("device" or "ploy" 499- 511) to propel himself into the garden, and later, when the poets deny to their charac ter Youth any engyn ("guile" 1264), which Chaucer here translates as "sleight" ("slyness" 1286). The first time, even if both poets recognize fol amor as error, the progres sion of the poem demands that the protagonist enter the ex clusive garden. The second time, because the word is new to most of Chaucer's hearers, it might seem strange to deny this characteristic to a personification of youth when it is necessary for a protagonist who is really a youth himself.
The fourth worldly rime-borrowing, enuyous, was as am biguous as the newer English term "ambitious." Both terms
27 seem congratulatory in application to people whom its users
evidently like and condemnatory in application to others.
The traitors at Rychesse's court are enuyous (1035- 1051 ),
and so, ironically, is the protagonist when C(o)urtesy (807)
invites him to join Love's courtiers in the dance, where
Chaucer carefully translates enuieus as "fayne" (795- 810),
meaning "fain" or "eager," losing irony but keeping hearers.
The fifth term, figure, also occurs only twice in the
OF Roman. The first time, figure appears there in its more
enduring sense, its still-current French meaning, "face."
Narcissus is looking in the fatal "wel" at his own features, which Chaucer here translates as "forme" (1487- 1521 ). The
term "figure" in English had apparently already acquired its
newer anatomical reference. The fountain itself, even so,
generally reveals the "colo(u)r" and "figure" of Les choses qui sont .9:. l'encontre ("al thyng that standeth therby,"
1556- 1586). This second instance of figure is more typical of its specific English reference to much larger shapes.
The sixth worldly rime-borrowing, megre, applies to two of the murals' personifications, Auarice and Sorowe. At the
first of the three instances, Chaucer uses [f]adde ("faded"
211) to replace megre, which Guillaume repeats only seven
lines later while he is still describing Auarice. In the
last incidence, Chaucer adds fade to complement megre and pale in Guillaume 's description o f Sorowe (302- 3 11 ) sug gesting that the "fading" then was more of figure (of size) t han of colo(u)r, though the hues in the paintings are pale. fade d i ffers from pale o nly in being a result o f a process .
2 8 The seventh term, moysoun, also appears only twice in
de Lorris's text. It first c i tes the "abundance" of C(o)ur-
tesy's neck (539- 551 ). This usage is too general and too
metaphorical for Chaucer's larger contemporary audience, but
Chaucer still tries to popularize moysoun in its older, spe-
cific sense: some potential roses are "of other moysoun"
( 1641- 1677), awaiting C(o)urtesy's "ripeness" until later.
The eighth term, notes, first appears in adjacent
clauses of the same sentence two lines apart in the Roman:
Si chauntent li uns rotruenges / Li autres notes Lohorenges; /
Por ce cou fet en Loheraigne / Plus beles notes qu'en nul
raigne (749-5 2 ) [So some sang troubadour poems/ The
others notes of Lorraine;/ Because
More beautiful notes than in any realm]. Chaucer replaces
the first line with a relative clause that he adds to mod-
ify the previous line's minstrels, "that wel to synge dyd
her payne" ["that tried painstakingly to sing well" 765].
He replaces Li autres (750) in the next line with "some"
( 766), there substituting "songes" for notes from the Roman.
Because the notion of e x act pitch was still a few centuries
away, the term notes was relative, meaning intervals between pitches, or, metaphorically, sequences of these intervals. 6
The remaining instance of notes implies a meaning like that of "songes": both poe t s have the birds singing "notes" and
"da ( u)nces" (495- 508). "Songes" also suggests Guillaume's terms s o nges ["dre am s " (1 )] and me nSong e s [ "lies" ( 2)], wh ich he s t r ugg les t o s e p ara te, b ut wh i ch bot h s om etimes d i ctate or dt l e as~ accompany t he c haracters' c ompulsive
2 9 movement. The word song, like thought, is a past partici ple that eventually indicates the objects of efforts that it depicts, which are in these instances singing and thinking.
Chaucer varies the OF Roman's close repetition of the term notes with the Old English word "songes," perhaps hoping to remind his hearers of two terms's similar meanings, perhaps also to suggest to his patrons the French cognate chanson.
The ninth term, plaine, has only two instances, both in the same line, in Guillaume's Roman, which has the French idiom de plain em plaing ("from fullness [integrity, consis tency] to fullness" 285). Chaucer translates this phrase by the English adverbial idiom "forthe-right playne" (295).
The simplicity and lack of engyn in this manner of regarding people, which Enuye has failed to develop, have already be gun shifting plain's meaning to its newer English sense.
The tenth term, QYng, apparently means in Old French another type of tree than the English pine. Chaucer adds, at its first use, "Whiche tree in Fraunce men cal a pyne"
(1427- 1457), where the Roman has only Vne fontaine soz ~ pin ["A fountain beneath a pine" (1427)]. Chaucer omits the fountain here, because the Roman cites it again in the next sentence, where, only eight lines away, each poet again will name the tree, with a definite article at this instance.
The last time that pin appears is thirty-seven lines later, after he has begun explaining how Narcissus has died of mad ness from staring at his reflection in the "fontaine" (1470-
1471 ). By this p o int, Chauc er's larger English audience has f o r gotte n the pine t r ee, wh ich then vanishes from the Roman.
30 The eleventh and last term, gueynte, had the same sound
in English as its French etymon cointe, from the Latin past
participle cognitum of the verb cognoscere "to know." It
had a Middle English anatomical reference, very distant from
its Current English reflex quaint, preventing its use in En glish for any person in poems claiming propriety. Chaucer himself, in his ribald Miller's Tale, uses this term in its adjectival sense as the Roman does, riming it with its newer nominal usage: "As clerkes been ful subtil and ful queynte;/
And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" (3275-3276).
Wherever it clearly modifies lifeless objects, Chaucer ex ercises his option to borrow the term, as when Guillaume has it describing styles of decoration on the robe (61- 65), the walls (600- 610) and the ground (1407- 1435). Even so,
Middle English usage demands its rejection for representing the Roman's observations about Oiseuse (Idelnesse 582- 593) in line 553, on Deduit (Myrthe 590- 601 ), about Beaute (992-
1056) in line 1015, or about Fra(u)nchise (1191- 1211) in line 1219. These four instances need skillful translation.
Technically, the reference for Idelnesse is to her clothing as cointe, but the two poets have twice just men tioned her cors ("body" 548- 559, 550- 561 ), so the English term gueynte here would seem an anatomical pun. Oiseuse's chapel ("hairband" 551) here is both cointe and deguise, which Chaucer translates as "semely" ("seemly" or "appropri ate'' 563). For Deduit, Chaucer ignores both source terms, mignot and cointe (590- 601 ), partly because the former has already become somewhat derisive in English. Nordahl, in
3 1 Ars Fidi Interpretis, explains Chaucer's treatment of these
emphatic juxtapositions of nearly synonymous terms from the
Roman MSS. Nordahl claims that analyzing Chaucer's Mid- dle English translations of these "signifiants coordonnls"
["balanced signifiers" (24)] will reveal "dans quelle mesure impressionnante Chaucer a r6alis6 l'id6al tr~s difficilement r6alisable du fidus interpres" ["to what an impressive de gree Chaucer has achieved the very elusive model of the faithful translator" (24)]. Here Chaucer combines two ideas that apparently will mislead his readers because they imply an engyn that Oiseuse ("Idelnesse" (582- 593) would conceal to make the garden as alluring as the narrator finds it.
When Guillaume introduces his patron personifications, he describes Richesse as Sade, plesant, cortoise, g cointe
(10 15), and Chaucer has "Sore pleasaunt, and fetys withall"
[ "Most pleasing, and shapely everywhere" 1031]. Sade in Old
French meant "serious, purposeful," so Chaucer's "Sore," which acquires in ME the meaning ''extremely," suggests Rich esse's tremendous effort to elicit a profitable impression o f herself from her c olleagues in the dance. One metaphor ical sense of fetys is "fitting, appropriate," a state that the dancers reach by making themselves cointe, here meaning
"re sourceful." Chaucer reduces this ambiguity by translat ing cort o i se a nd cointe simply as "fety s " (1015- 103 1 ) , sug gesting an affinity with se m~, as both ha ve developed the mo r e gener a l connotation of con forming adaptatio n. Fra(u )n c hyse too is more cq_int e ( "fe tyse " 12 19- 1241 ) in her s hape s ho wing .§..Org ueni e t h a n s he wou l d b e in an amorpho us cote.
32 Chaucer's worldly rime-borrowings are much more freq uent and complex than his courtly rime-borrowings. This corpus of only the terms most o rthoepically comparable be tween French and English that Chaucer sometimes translates shows that Chaucer's main interest lies in giving the new
English middle class greater access to scholarly literature.
Because most hearers will lack enough literacy to appreciate the borrowings' subtler, more metaphorical meanings, Chaucer restricts their usage to contexts where their connotations will be simplest and thus clearest for his larger audiences.
Although moysoun confronts agricultural workers' solidarity during an era when most people are rural peasants, the re maining terms from the corpus are still current in English.
The Romaunt's other borrowings enjoy comparable success.
Chaucer's greatest success with the Romaunt appears to have been skill to impress French nobles as plesaunt while considerably favoring all his English-speaking colleagues.
Because these hearers hardly typify the romantic nobles in the Roman, they might provide another reason for abandoning the translation, if in fact Chaucer actually does so. Chau cer's affection for the Roman is abundantly clear in later works, as for example in Alysoun of Bath's resemblance to the Roman character La Vieille. Therefore, any attempt to attribute the Romaunt to Chauc er must account for its trun cation and for the nearly t otal lack of Romaunt manuscripts.
Chaucer's diffic ulty in reproducing the Roman's satire is consistent wit h his i mmedi ate audie nce ' s d emands, t hough his linguis tic success indic ates his deve l o ping poetic genius.
33 Part V: Scholarship Seeking the Romaunt's Authorship
The advantage of comparing Sutherland's texts with Mer sand's, Smith's, Kaufman's and Geissman's lists as Tatlock's
Concordance amplifies them is that Chaucer's style can thus become an objective and quantifiable phenomenon. Chaucer tries studiously and with reasonable success to emulate the
Roman's courtliness, but he lacks the necessary experience of even the Roman's narrator, let alone its author, to give
Guillaume's critical perspective on chivalry. His direct borrowings place his neophyte persona among the mythological personages and the fictional protagonist that he admiringly tries to represent for his readers. Perhaps if he abandons the Romaunt, he sees his courtly apprenticeship making him depend on princes too naively to let him satirize chivalry.
The authorship dispute probably causes the absolute silence concerning the Romaunt among such prominent mediev alists as Huot, Hult, Robertson, and Badel, in their long books on the Roman's influence. Sylvia Huot is probably right to agree with Hult that Guillaume will remain obscure, and even Dragonetti might also be correct in his suspicion that Jean created Guillaume to facilitate his own narrative agenda (2). Even so, all these writers would probably agree with Hult that de Lorris's initial section of the Roman is a complete and internally consistent work, fulfilling medieval and modern critics' s tandards for integrity and closure (6).
The Romaunt A-Fragment seems almost equally so, and even if scholars could reveal it as another medieval writer's work, this poem is still just as inf luenti a l a s Guillaume's Roman.
34 One indication that a genius of diction wrote the Ro maunt is the judicious restraint that the translator shows in knowing when to borrow directly. For example, Guillaume writes Tot le riuage costoiant (128): the translation reads
"The riuers syde [costeying]" (134), and Mersand comments on the Romaunt that "To use rivage in English would be an indication of Gallicism pure and simple" (59). Though one skill of great poets is the expansion of their languages, another is the recognition of contexts where existing words are more effective, so that innovations will disperse better because they occur only where they are necessary. Chaucer first uses the combination translating riuage, and eleven other words using English roots, dropping all twelve (60): apparently the aristocrats prefer the French borrowings.
Another factor that might contribute to Chaucer's aban donment of the English coinages beggarly, clapers, fure, jargoning, popped, ribaninges, river-syde, royne, roinous, saylours, tasseled, and terins (Mersand 60), is that they might already be very frequent and thus have acquired new meanings outside Chaucer's prospective contexts. All these words remain in English, though most have newer sounds and senses. It would suggest that Chaucer advances to new terms because the courtiers prefer the chivalrous borrowings over
Chaucer's worldly coinages on English roots. The English neologisms had much wider appreciative audiences if patrons disliked them. The Romaunt satirizes chivalry by its own terms, which Chaucer translates , calques (as in river-syde), o r replaces as his developing courtly awarenes s prompts him.
3 5 Appendix A: Geissman's Facultative Rime-Borrowings
Asyse (900): Yset by compace in asyse/
(888): Qui furent par grant sens asises/
(1237): That it nas in his right assyse/
(1216): Quine fust en son droit asise/
(1392): One from another, in assyse/
(1367): Li uns fu loing de l'autre asis/
(195): Une autre ymage i ot asise/
(1100): .I. escharbocle (bien asise);/
(1434): Soz le pin le fontaine assise./
Delitable (1371 ): And many a spyce delytable/
(1345): Et maint espice delitable/
(1440): Of al this garden dil[i]table./
(1412): Dou leu plaisant e delitable./
(637): Tant estoit li leus delitables/
Engyn (511 ): By whiche arte, or by what engyn/
(499): Par quel art ne par quel engin/
( 1264): Nul mal ne nul engin qui soit,/
Envious (1051 ): And many a traytour enuyous,/
(1035): Maint traitor, maint enuieus,/
(795): Estoie enuieus e sorpris./
Figure (1587): As wel the color as the fygure,/
(1558): E (la) colore (la) figure,/
(1487): Qu'il cuida uoair la figure/
Lynage (258): If she se any great lynage /
(246): Quant el uoit aucun grant lignage/
(1130): El fu dou lignage Alixandre;/
(1176): Tint .i. cheualier dou lignage/
36 Maystrye (842): And shode he was with great maystrye,/
(826): Chauciez refu per gr£nt mestrise,/
(1099): Mes devant ot (par grant mestrise)/
(1433): Ot Nature par gr£nt mestrise/
Megre (218): And therto she was leane and megre. /
(206): E auec ce que el ert meigre,/
(311 ): Ful fade, pale, and megre also./
(302): E maigre e pale deuenir./
(199): Cele ymage est meigre e chetiue,/
Mayson (1677): And some there ben of other moyson,/
(1641 ): Si en i a d'autre moison,/
(539): Li (cos) ot de bone moison,/
Notes (508): Daunces of loue, and mery notes./
(495): Les dances d'amors e les notes/
(767): For in Loreyne her notes be/
(750): Li autres notes lohorenges;/
(752): Plus beles notes qu'en nul raigne./
Plaine (295): Of man ne woman forthe-right plaine./
(285): Regarder rien de plain em plaing,/
(285): Regarder rein de plain em plaing,/
Plesaunt (1031 ): Sore plesaunt, and fetys withall,/
(1015): Sade, plesant, cortoise, e cointe,/
(1242): Ie ne sai fame (si) pleisant. /
(1264): I wotte no lady so plesaunt. /
(117): A regarder le leu pleisant. /
(701 ): Gr£nt seruise e doze plesant/
(1390): Vne noise douce e plessant. /
(1412) : Dou leu pleisant e delitable./
37 Prowesse (261 ): Or by his wit or by his prowesse,/
(249): Par son sens (ou) par sa proesce,/
(277): Sa proesce au mains, e s'anor./
Pyne (1457): Whiche tree in Fraunce men cal a pyne;/
(1427): Vne fontaine soz .i. pin;/
(1464): Vnder that pyne-tree a wel./
( 1434): Soz le pin le fontaine asise./
(1471 ): Se uint soz le pin ombroier,/
Queynte (65): And maketh so queynt his robe and fayre/
(61 ): Si sot si cointe robe feire/
(610): That neyther ben iolyfe ne queynte,/
(600): Quine sont mignotes ne cointes,/
(1435): Ful gaye was al the grounde, and queynt,/
(1407): Trop par ert cele terre cointe,/
(553): Plus cointe ne plus deguise;/
(590): De Deduit le mignot, le cointe,/
(1015): Sade, plesant, cortoise e cointe,/
(1219): Fame est plus cointe e plQs mignote;/
Reine (448): They lesen God and eke his reigne./
(440): Qui lor toudra Deu e son raine./
(752): Plus beles notes qu'en nul raigne./
Servise (669): By note made fayre seruyse/
(657): Trop par fessoient bel seruise/
( 713): Ful fayre seruyce and eke ful swete/
( 701 ): Grant seruise e doz e plesant/
(1145): Son arnie par s on grant s eruise; /
3 8 Appendix B: Courtly Rime-Borrowings from Appendix A
Lynage (258): If she se any great lynage/
(246): Quant el uoit aucun grant lignage/
(1130): El fu dou lignage Alixandre;/
(1176): Tint .i. cheualier dou lignage/
Maystrye (842): And shode he was with great maystrye,/
(826): Chauciez refu per gr£nt mestrise,/
(1099): Mes devant ot (par grant mestrise)/
(143 3 ): Ot Nature par gr£nt mestrise/
Plesaunt (1031 ): Sore plesaunt, and fetys withall,/
(1015): Sade, plesant, cortoise, e cointe,/
(1242): Ie ne sai fame (si) pleisant./
(1264): I wotte no lady so plesaunt./
(117): A regarder le leu pleisant./
(701 ): Gr£nt seruise e doze plesant/
(1390): Vne noise douce e plessant./
(1412): Dou leu pleisant e delitable./
Prowesse (261 ): Or by his wit or by his prowesse,/
(249): Par son sens (ou) par sa proesce,/
(277): Sa proesce au mains, e s'anor./
Reine (448): They lesen God and eke his reigne./
(440): Qui lor toudra Deu e son raine./
(752): Plus beles notes qu'en nul raigne. /
Serv ise (669): By note made fayre seruyse/
( 657 ) : Tro p par fessoient bel seruise/
( 71 3 ): Ful f ayre seruyce and eke ful swete/
(701 ) : Grant seruise e d o z e p lesant/
( 1 145 ) : So n amie par son gra nt seruise; /
39 Appendix C: Worldly Rime-Borrowings from Appendix A
Asyse (900): Yset by compace in asyse/
(888): Qui furent par grant sens asises/
(1237): That it nas in his right assyse/
(1216): Quine fust en son droit asise/
(1392): One from another, in assyse/
(1367): Li uns fu loing de l'autre asis/
(195): Une autre ymage i ot asise/
(1100): .I. escharbocle (bien asise);/
(1434): Soz le pin le fontaine assise./
Delitable: (1371 ): And many a spyce delytable/
(1345): Et maint espice delitable/
(1440): Of al this garden dil[i]table./
(1412): Dou leu plaisant e delitable./
(637): Tant estoit li leus delitables/
Engyn (511 ): By whiche arte, or by what engyn/
(499): Par quel art ne par quel engin/
(1264): Nul mal ne nul engin qui soit,/
Envious (1051 ): And many a traytour enuyous,/
(1035): Maint traitor, maint enuieus,/
(795): Estoie enuieus e sorpris./
Figure (1587): As wel the color as the fygure,/
(1558): E (la) colore ( la) figure, /
( 1487): Qu'i l c uida uo air la figure /
Me g r e (2 18 ) : And therto she wa s l eane and megre. /
(20 6 ): E auec c e que el e rt meigre, /
( 3 11 ): Ful fade, pale, and megre also. /
( 302 ): E maigre e pale d e uenir. /
40 (199): Cele ymage est meigre e chetiue,/
Mayson (1677): And some there ben of other moyson,/
(1641 ): Si en i a d'autre moison,/
(539): Li (cos) ot de bone moison,/
Notes (508): Daunces of loue, and mery notes./
(495): Les dances d'amors e les notes/
( 7 6 7): For in Loreyne her notes be/
(750): Li autres notes lohorenges;/
(752): Plus beles notes qu'en nul raigne./
Plaine ( 295): Of man ne woman forthe-right plaine./
(285): Regarder rien de plain em plaing,/
(285): Regarder rein de plain em plaing,/
Pyne (1457): Whiche tree in Fraunce men cal a pyne;/
(1427): Vne fontaine soz .i. pin;/
(1464): Vnder that pyne-tree a wel./
(1434): Soz le pin le fontaine asise./
(1471 ): Se uint soz le pin ombroier,/
Queynte (65): And maketh so queynt his robe and fayre/
(61 ): Si sot si cointe robe feire/
(610): That neyther ben iolyfe ne queynte,/
(600): Qui ne sont mignotes ne cointes,/
(1435): Ful gaye was al the grounde, and queynt,/
(1407): Trop par ert cele terre cointe,/
( 553): Plus cointe ne plus deguise; /
(590): De Deduit le mignot, le cointe, /
( 1015): Sade, plesant, cortoise e cointe,/
( 1 21 9): Fame est plus coi nte e plg_s Inignote; I
41 Notes
1 Steiner insists throughout After Babel that artful close translation depends on translators' unique skills and knowledge. Though translators must fulfill responsibilities to source texts and the even older sources that their writ- ers compile in them, "Through engagement of his own identi ty, a critic becomes un interpr~te--a lifegiving performer- of Montaigne or Mallarme"~ (27). This claim closely resem- bles Huot's remarks directly below about mutual authorship.
2 Though Huot concentrates on French writers' responses to the Roman, her work on these later commentaries suggests the significance of subsequent authors' reinterpretations for the Roman's critical success and popular survival.
Explaining scribal emendations distinguishing the author from the protagonist, she traces critical awareness of the
Roman as a compendium of various sources to its origins in
Guillaume (1988: 46). Later authors have performed similar feats of originality in recombining Roman material with their own knowledge and ideas. Particularly, Huot describes the poet Guide Mori's self-imposition on Guillaume's text in de Mori's own version of the Roman: "It is probably be- cause of his strong presence in the text that Gui has been accepted as something akin t o an author by modern critics"
(1 993: 332). The Roman' s s ucc ess derives partly from the types and amounts of r e alignment its material has inspired among diverse later po ets and other critics. The Romaunt is t he last major med ieval r ework i ng o f the Roman and the last version bef ore Thynne ' s 1532 edition o t Chaucer's works.
4 2 3 The history of the authorship dispute in this para- graph is based on Robert French's summary account (78-80).
4 Other critics have implicitly supported David's re-
jection of Sutherland's scrupulous Romaunt by maintaining a long silence about the Middle English version of the Roman.
Even so, the reason for the Roman's success is Guillaume's ingenious compilation of his own sources, because it has in- fluenced numerous other writers to infuse it similarly among their later works. Sutherland, like any effective critic or poet, uses the best material from each available source.
5 Janice Kaufman's comparative list of borrowings (63-
66) from the Roman directly into the Romaunt shows Kaufman's conclusion that any term evidently appearing for the first time in the Romaunt (because scholars have yet to find it in any older English MS) is therefore a Chaucerian innovation.
As Feng shows, only rime-words have the memorability and thus the relative freedom from scribal error necessary for studies of borrowing (16). The Romaunt's neologisms appar- ently are those terms sounding most like their French etyma that the translator borrows only in their literal senses.
Smith, using criteria like Kaufman's and Mersand's, asserts that cloth(ing) terms refute the assumption that the Romaunt
"functioned as a vehicle for transference of words from OF to ME" (89). Her restrictive corpus fails to disprove this.
6 On the establishment o f pitch standards, The Harvard
Dictionary of Music indicates that ''The first proposal of a specific frequenc y a s a s tanda rd pitch ( equivalent to a'=4 27
Hz) wa s made by Joseph Sauveur in t he e a r ly 17 00s'' (639). Works Cited
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