Product Description
A critical edition of the anonymous fifteenth-century French translation of Alan of Lille's 'Liber Parabolarum' which has never been edited. The 1492 print by Antoine Verard survives in fewer than than a dozen copies.
About the Author
Tony Hunt is a fellow of St Peter's College, Oxford.
Excerpted from Paraboles Maistre Alain En Francoys, Les by a. Hunt. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Alan of Lille's Liber Parabolarum, often known as Doctrinale minus or Parvum Doctrinale, was no doubt an early work, though there have been no credible attempts at a precise dating. It is a collection of sententious comparisons (which in chapter 1 are presented in an initial hexameter) which generate moral maxims (in chapter 1 they are expressed in a following pentameter), grouped according to subject, amounting to 321 distichs in all. These are presented in a quite distinctive arrangement. The collection has six chapters, each of which groups the distichs in sections of predetermined length, whilst the overall allocation of distichs per chapter remains remarkably consistent: the verses are in pairs (distichs) in chapter 1 (56), in fours in chapter 2 (52), in sixes in chapter 3 (51), in eights in chapter 4 (52), in tens in chapter 5 (50), and in sections of a dozen lines in chapter 6 (60). This is not apparent from the text printed in Migne's Patrologia Latina 210, cols.579–94, but is clearly indicated in the commentary which is found at the head of each chapter in the French translation which we edit below. Free use is made of classical and Scriptural sources and despite Raynaud de Lage's low estimate of the work, it has to be recognized that it was remarkably popular as a school text, being incorporated into the enlargement of the 'Liber Catonianus' known as the 'Auctores octo morales' where it kept company with the Disticha Catonis, Ecloga Theodoli, Facetus, Cartula, the Tobias of Matthew of Vendôme, the Aesop of Gualterus Anglicus (Anonymus Neveleti) and the Floretus. This important corpus of educational texts remained a standard collection in the humanistic learning of the Renaissance, but by that time several of the individual works had been translated in the vernacular.
The first example of translation of the Parabolae is found in a late-thirteenth century compilation from Reading Abbey, now MS London, Lambeth Palace Library 371, the later part of which contains a text of the Disticha Catonis accompanied by Everard's Anglo-Norman translation, the 'Novus Cato' and the 'Cartula'. Among these, on ff.130va–134ra, is a text of the Parabolae up to and including V,3, written in a brown ink. From the beginning up to and including II,7 the Latin distichs or groups of distichs are followed (with a few exceptions) by an Anglo-Norman prose paraphrase (rather than strict translation) written in red. The content of the distichs has been resumed in Latin marginal summaries which have unfortunately been damaged by cropping of the pages. It is clear that sometimes the Anglo-Norman paraphrase is based on, or influenced by, the Latin summary rather than the text itself. In addition, there are some interlinear variants to the Latin text. It seems fair to say!
that the vernacular is provided less as an aid to construing the Latin of the Parabolae than as a device to ensure adequate comprehension of each distich's moral sense.
The first example of translation of the Parabolae is found in a late-thirteenth century compilation from Reading Abbey, now MS London, Lambeth Palace Library 371, the later part of which contains a text of the Disticha Catonis accompanied by Everard's Anglo-Norman translation, the 'Novus Cato' and the 'Cartula'. Among these, on ff.130va–134ra, is a text of the Parabolae up to and including V,3, written in a brown ink. From the beginning up to and including II,7 the Latin distichs or groups of distichs are followed (with a few exceptions) by an Anglo-Norman prose paraphrase (rather than strict translation) written in red. The content of the distichs has been resumed in Latin marginal summaries which have unfortunately been damaged by cropping of the pages. It is clear that sometimes the Anglo-Norman paraphrase is based on, or influenced by, the Latin summary rather than the text itself. In addition, there are some interlinear variants to the Latin text. It seems fair to say!
that the vernacular is provided less as an aid to construing the Latin of the Parabolae than as a device to ensure adequate comprehension of each distich's moral sense.
