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30 - The French of English Letters: Two Trilingual Verse Epistles in Context

from Section IV - England and French in the late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

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Affiliation:
University of Bristol
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Summary

I would like to focus on a pair of remarkable trilingual poems from around 1400, which take the fictional form of a pair of letters. One of these, entitled De amico ad amicam in a Latin rubric, is from a lover to his lady and opens with the French verse A celuy que plus eyme en mounde; the other, which purports to be the lady's reply, is headed Responcio, and begins A soun treschere et special. The poems have been edited several times, most recently by Thomas Duncan, on the basis of the two manuscripts that were then known to exist: Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 [C] – an important early fifteenth-century anthology once owned by an East Anglian gentry family, and also containing the earliest and arguably best texts of the Parliament of Fowls and the Legend of Good Women – and British Library, MS Harley 3362 [H], a codex containing mostly grammatical texts and probably a student textbook, with marginalia that connect it to the University of Oxford. A few years ago a new manuscript witness came to light in the Armburgh Papers [A], a roll, Manchester, Chetham's Library, MS Mun. E.6.10 (4), consisting principally of letters and legal documents mostly in English related to the Armburgh family. This family originally came from East Anglia, and the roll records their efforts to enhance their ‘worship’ and their portfolio of real estate in the county of Warwickshire.

Type
Chapter
Information
Language and Culture in Medieval Britain
The French of England, c.1100–c.1500
, pp. 397 - 408
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2009

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