Sequence of Saint Eulalia explained

The Sequence of Saint Eulalia, also known as the Canticle of Saint Eulalia (French: Séquence/Cantilène de sainte Eulalie) is the earliest surviving piece of French hagiography and one of the earliest extant texts in the vernacular langues d'oïl (Old French). It dates from around 880.

Eulalia of Mérida was an early Christian martyr from Mérida, Spain, who was killed during the Persecution of Diocletian around 304. Her legend is recounted in the 29 verses of the Sequence, in which she resists pagan threats, bribery and torture from the pagan emperor Maximian. She miraculously survives being burned at the stake, but is finally decapitated. She then ascends to heaven in the form of a dove.

The Sequence was composed in verse around 880, soon after the rediscovery of the relics of a saint of the same name, Eulalia of Barcelona, in 878.

Manuscript

The manuscript containing the Sequence is a collection of sermons by Gregory of Nazianzus. It is first mentioned in a 12th-century catalog of the library of Saint-Amand Abbey, although the production of the manuscript has been dated to the early 9th century. It is not known with certainty where it was produced. B. Bischoff suggests that it came from a scriptorium in (Lower) Lotharingia, but not from Saint-Amand itself, given its style of construction and the handwriting, which cannot be matched to other manuscripts produced there during the same period.

The manuscript is less significant for its original content, however, than for the empty pages at the end that later scribes filled in with additional texts. These include:

The Sequence and the German: Ludwigslied are written in the same hand, and since the preamble of the German: Ludwigslied (which celebrates the battle of Saucourt, which took place on 3 August 881) speaks of Louis III (who died in 882) as being alive, both additions to the manuscript are dated to late 881 or early 882.[1]

When Jean Mabillon visited Saint-Amand Abbey in 1672, he made a hasty copy of the German: Ludwigslied, but neither he nor his hosts seem to have recognized the significance of the Sequence immediately preceding it. When Mabillon and the historian Johannes Schilter attempted to obtain a better transcription of the German: Ludwigslied in 1693, the monks of the abbey were unable to locate the manuscript. It remained lost throughout the 18th century, until the entire contents of the abbey library were confiscated and transferred to Valenciennes in 1792, by order of the revolutionary government. In September 1837, Hoffmann von Fallersleben visited the library of Valenciennes with the intention of unearthing the lost text of the German: Ludwigslied. According to his account, it only took him one afternoon to find the manuscript and to realize that it contained another important text, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.[2]

Text

The Eulalia text is a sequence or "prose" consisting of 14 assonant couplets, each written on one line and separated by a punctus, followed by a final unpaired coda verse. The Sequence follows no strict meter. Most of the couplets consist of two ten-syllable verses, although some have 11, 12, or 13 syllables.

Both the vernacular Sequence and the Latin poem that precedes it show similarities with the hymn to Eulalia in the, by the 4th-century Christian poet Prudentius.

A transcription of the original text is provided below (with abbreviations expanded and some word boundaries inserted),[3] along with a reconstructed phonetic transcription[4] and an English translation.[5]

Analysis

Dialect

The language of the Sequence presents characteristics of Walloon, Champenois, and Picard. At the time, these three Oïl varieties shared a common Latin: scripta, or written literary koiné.[6] The evidence points to a geographic origin for the text in modern-day Wallonia or an adjacent region of north-east France.[7]

Some northern/northeastern dialectal features of the texts are:[8]

In contrast, the epenthetic pronounced as /link/ indicated by the forms French, Old (842-ca.1400);: voldrent (lines 3, 4, <), French, Old (842-ca.1400);: voldret (line 21, <) and French, Old (842-ca.1400);: sostendreiet (line 16, <) is more characteristic of central French dialects.

The pronoun French, Old (842-ca.1400);: lo that appears in line 19 (instead of the expected feminine form French, Old (842-ca.1400);: la) has been variously explained as a dialectal feature, a pejorative neuter ("they threw it into the fire"), or simply a scribal error.[9]

Line 15

Line 15 of the Sequence is "one of the most vexed lines of Old French literature".[10] The identity of the verb is debated: early editors read French, Old (842-ca.1400);: adunet, but a reexamination of the manuscript by Learned (1941) revealed that the copyist originally wrote French, Old (842-ca.1400);: aduret. Scholars disagree about whether the line turning the ⟨r⟩ into an ⟨n⟩ was an inadvertent ink smudge or a deliberate correction by the copyist. Several interpretations have been proposed for both readings, including:[11]

Scholars further disagree about whether the possessive adjective in French, Old (842-ca.1400);: lo suon element refers to Eulalia or to Maximian, and about the nature of this French, Old (842-ca.1400);: element.[12] Questions also surround the syntactic construction of the line, as well as the interpretation of the verse within the context of the Sequence.

The following examples illustrate the variety of translations suggested for this verse:

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Book: Ayres-Bennett, Wendy . A history of French language through texts . Routledge . 1996 . 9780203986738 . London . 29.
  2. Hoffmann & Willems (1837, p. 3); Simeray (1990, p. 56ff)
  3. For a closer transcription, see e.g. Foerster and Koschwitz (1902, cols. 48–51). The first published transcription of the Sequence can be found in Hoffmann & Willems (1837, p. 6). For images of the manuscript, see the website of the Bibliothèque de Valenciennes.
  4. Porter . L. C. . The "Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie": Phonology and Graphemics . Studies in Philology . 1960 . 57 . 4 . 587–596 . 4173323 . 0039-3738.
  5. The first half of the translation is taken from Ayres-Bennett (1996, p. 32). The second half is taken from Bauer & Slocum (Old French Online).
  6. "L'Eulalie réunit dans sa langue certains traits picards, wallons et champenois qui ensemble impliquent la pratique d'une scripta poétique romane commune aux trois régions" (Delbouille 1977, p. 104). "The second existing text in Old French (with Picard and Walloon features) is a rendering of a short sequence by Prudentius on the life of St. Eulalia, precisely dated (AD 880–882)" Encyclopædia Britannica on Line.
  7. "N'est-ce pas en région picarde ou wallonne que ces lettres [les lettres françaises] ont poussé leur premier cri avec la Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie ?" (Genicot 1973, p. 170); see also Avalle (1966).
  8. Fought (1979, p. 846); Ayres-Bennett (1996, p. 34)
  9. Berger & Boucher (2004, p. 142)
  10. Atkinson (1968, p. 599)
  11. Price (1990, p. 84–87)
  12. Some authors suggest that the manuscript has the wrong word, and propose that French, Old (842-ca.1400);: element should be emended to Latin: mentem, Latin: alimentum, Latin: alia mente, or Latin: linamentum (Price 1990, p. 85).
  13. Berger & Brasseur (2004, pp. 62, 72f)
  14. Hoffmann & Willems (1845, p. 34)
  15. Hatcher (1949)
  16. Barnett (1961)
  17. Hilty (1990, p. 73)

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Sequence of Saint Eulalia".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.