Genre in BNF, fr. 837

BNF, fr. 837 contains a wide range of texts; sacred and secular, edifying and rude, supernatural and mundane.

These include:
love poetry, prayers, paternosters, credos, abcs, funny stories, rude funny stories, tales of adventure, moral and edifying stories, astrology, texts about women, fables, love stories, saints’ lives, beast epic, tales of Heaven and Hell, texts about wine, historical notes, allegorical works, plays and dialogues, proverbs

Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), ff. 66v-67r
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

Here, a retelling of the Prodigal Son story (Cortois d’Arras) is juxtaposed with a fabliau, Boivins de Provins.

The last line of Cortois and the first line of Boivins are only a few lines apart. They are, respectively:

‘Chantons de deus laudamus’
(Let us sing about God; let us praise Him.)

and

‘Molt bons lechierres fu Boivins’
(Boivin was admirably fond of the pleasures of the flesh.)

This rather brings out the contrast between the two texts, but also suggests that medieval readers liked a variety of different types of reading matter.

In terms of moral viewpoint, the two texts are worlds apart. Cortois implicitly condemns both the sin of frolicking with prostitutes and the sin of pride, and believing oneself more entitled than others. What is important is forgiveness, even and especially of the unworthy.

Boivins, meanwhile, adopts a different stance. The main character carries out a complicated ruse in order to obtain free food, drink and sex, and is thought to be rather clever for doing so. It is patently amoral.

The form of the two texts is also different. Cortois is almost entirely dialogue, whereas Boivins is a story with a narrator.

However, there is an important similarity: in both cases, a sizeable proportion of the text is a scene at a brothel with two women attempting to swindle a man.

The main difference is that Cortois loses all his money to the women, whereas Boivin is tricking the women into thinking they are swindling him, while he swindles them. He is pretending to be what Cortois really is: an innocent, ready to be fleeced.

This really brings home how very interconnected medieval literature is, and makes us aware of the limits of genre labels: two texts, nominally belonging to different genres, may still have a lot in common.

Of course, many of the genre labelling words we use are largely the product of modern criticism. The word ‘fabliau’, for instance, did exist in medieval French, but it is used now to mean short stories in verse, mostly funny and sometimes rude: there is a (debated) canon of fabliaux, which includes many texts that do not call themselves fabliaux, and excludes some texts that do.

This particular manuscript does have a genre labelling system, but some  terms within that system seem more straightforward than others. The term ‘patrenostre’ is one which is clearer in meaning.

Edited paternoster
Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), f. 247v (detail).
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

The manuscript contains several texts which are labelled as a ‘patrenostre’ in the explicit.
This is the end of a ‘patrenostre d’amours’, with the word ‘patrenostre’ in the explicit circled in blue.
The same format is used for all the ‘patrenostres’. The Latin text of the pater noster (Lord’s prayer) is broken up into small chunks, and used as a frame for the French verse text, which is sometimes a translation and expansion of the Latin, and sometimes utterly unrelated. The Latin framework is underlined in blue. As you can see, it forms a fairly small proportion of the text.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is another extract, transcribed and translated.

‘Sanctificetur…’
Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), f. 247r
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

‘Sanctificetur. Douce dame
Qui es sauveresse de m’ame
Quant del cors me departira
Et li angeles l’emportera
Dame se deveniez m’amie
Molt en seroit mieudre ma vie
Nomen tuum. veraiement
m’est vis qu’ele est apertement
la plus bele…’

‘Hallowed be. Sweet lady
you who are the saviour of my soul
when it leaves my body
and the angel takes it away;
Lady, if you were to become my lover
my life would be much better.
Thy name. Truly,
I think that she is obviously
The most beautiful of all women…’

An ‘ABC’
Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), f. 170v (detail)
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

 

Other similar genres are ABCs and Credos, which work in the same way, insofar as they have a framework (the alphabet or the Latin Credo) which is amplified with French verse.

For the terms fable, fabliau, dit, conte and ditié, things get rather more complicated.

Sometimes they seem interchangeable, but at other times they are used as if they have quite distinct meanings: even within this one manuscript.

Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), f. 199r (detail)
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

Here, the words ‘conte’ and ‘dit’ appear to be used interchangeably: the word ‘conte’ is used within the text to refer to the text, but the explicit calls it a ‘dit’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At other times, the impression is given that these words do have meanings, and mean different things. The beginning of this story, for example, sets up an opposition between ‘fable’ (made up stories) and truth.

Text opening with ‘fable’
Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), f. 265v (detail)
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

‘Whoever makes rhymes or fables
Instead of telling you a fable
I will tell you an adventure that really happened:
Who it was about and how it ended.
I will tell you the truth about it.
It came to pass in a city
That there were two money-changers…’

Another text begins: ‘People make fabliaux out of fables, and new notes out of sounds…’

 

Next: Rutebeuf: an author apart

 

 

The first text: a matrix-text?

The first text of BNF fr. 837 has a more elaborately decorated initial than the other texts in the codex.

Paris, BNF, fr. 837, f. 1ra Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN

Paris, BNF, fr. 837, f. 1ra
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN

It is not unusual in medieval manuscripts for the first initial to be bigger and more embellished than the rest. As we discuss here, the image in this historiated initial (?) could offer information about the codex’s original patron.

However, it also poses an interesting question of textual interpretation.

Does this mean that the first text is particularly important or significant? Should we consider it as having a higher status than the other texts in the manuscript?

Some critics, such as Yasmina Foehr-Janssens, have argued that the Dit du Barisel can be seen as a matrix text for the whole codex: all the other texts in the manuscript should be seen through the lens of this one text, and interpreted in its light. In other words, it becomes the key to understanding this diverse and wide-ranging codex, and represents a microcosm of the whole book.

The Dit du Barisel recounts the transformation of a unrepentant reprobate into a pious and humble man. There are many other stories in the codex that share the same themes of confession, repentance and the rehabilitation of sinners. Indeed, the first stories in the collection of works by Rutebeuf share these themes. Skip to our spotlight on Rutebeuf to find out more.

Like the Dit du Barisel, the majority of items in BNF, fr. 837 are relatively short. This has left scholars wondering if the codex was intended to be a manuscript of short texts. You can find out more about the question of length in BNF, fr. 837 by clicking here.

 

A Manuscript of Short Texts?

Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), ff. 252v-253r
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN

BNF, fr. 837 is mostly composed of short texts. Some of the shortest are lyric poems and texts denouncing bad behaviour; the longest is a saint’s life, and other long ones include a long lyric poem and a short story.

Although the longer texts are much longer than the shorter ones, the manuscript contains no extremely long texts; many other manuscripts have much greater variation in text length.

However, there are some places in the manuscript where several pages are missing, and for many of these, it is possible that some of the missing texts were long texts. Keith Busby suggests that the long texts were removed quite deliberately, to turn the manuscript into a collection of short texts, when perhaps it started off as a collection of texts of varying lengths.

Paris, BNF, fr. 837 (pre 1300), ff. 149v-150r
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?

This is one of those places. As well as a nineteenth-century note that there are some pages missing, there is also a note of missing texts in a fourteenth-century hand. Either this person had access to a table of contents for the manuscript, or he had access to another copy, and he felt it was a good idea to make notes of all the missing texts.

He notes that the rest of the text on the first page,  ‘Le Chevalier qui fist parler les cons’ is missing, and that the beginning of the text on the second page, ‘La Housse partie’, is also missing. He also notes one missing text between them: a version of Ovid’s Art of Love.

There were many different versions of Ovid’s Art of Love circulating in medieval French; four have survived, and we know of at least one, by Chrétien de Troyes, that hasn’t. They varied enormously in length.

It is possible that the missing Ovid had the full Latin text, and a French translation. That would make it a very long text indeed, and would fit Busby’s theory that somebody deliberately removed the very long texts.

On the other hand, some versions of the Art of Love were considerably shorter. There is a version that survives in another manuscript BNF, fr. 19152 which has a very similar medieval title, ‘Ci comence de Ovide de Arte’, and which is relatively short: the same length as the ‘Le Vair palefroi’, the third longest text in our manuscript. If the missing Art of Love were that version, it would not seem out of place at all.

We cannot know for certain. That is one of the fascinating (and sometimes frustrating) things about medieval studies – sometimes the answer is not recoverable.

Next: Reader intervention

The Golden Age

The period from 1275 until 1325 could easily be described as the golden age for the production of large literary manuscript collections in Northern France. For more information on the diverse compilations from this period see the work of the Hypercodex team.

BNF, fr. 837 was probably created around the last quarter of the thirteenth century and offers one example of the manuscript compilations produced in this vibrant period.

The codicological evidence suggests that BNF, fr. 837 was produced in a professional setting rather than by an amateur compiler. The style of decoration and illustration often provides the most important evidence for identifying the geographical and historical origins of a codex. The style of decoration found in BNF, fr. 837 links the manuscript to Paris. Alison Stones has  suggested that it may be associated with the artist known as the Hospitaller Master, who is known to have worked in the region of Paris until around 1280. For more information about the decoration of manuscripts click here.

Paris emerged as an important centre of commercial book production in the later Middle Ages. Richard and Mary Rouse examine the processes and people behind book trade in their seminal study, Manuscripts and their Makers. See further reading for more information.

To discover more about the manufacture of this codex click here.

 

A Veritable Cornucopia

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 837

Paris, BNF, fr. 837 is a large manuscript collection which contains an incredible array of medieval French texts. It constitutes one of the most important witnesses of thirteenth-century vernacular (?) literature produced in northern France. Moreover, the manuscript also bears witness to what might be described as a boom in the production of large literary multi-text codices. Find out more here.

At first sight, it seems to be a highly disparate miscellany. Indeed, the generic diversity of this codex has left many critics bedazzled. Learn more about the the codex’s complex cocktail of genres.

However, is it possible to identify any principles of organisation that govern its arrangement? And can the first text provide any significant clues?

The beginning of Rutebeuf's author collection in BNF, fr. 837, f. 283vb Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN

The beginning of Rutebeuf’s author collection in BNF, fr. 837, f. 283vb
Reproduced by courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/?lang=EN

In its current condition all of the texts are exceptionally short in length. Why is this? Did length play a role in the various stages of its organisation?

At a time when most short texts were transmitted anonymously, what is the significance of an author collection in this codex?

The codex appears to have passed through the hands of various readers, with quite different concerns. Interested in finding out more about their scribblings? Click here.