Two Middle English Translations of Friar Laurent’s Somme le roi: Critical Edition ed. by Emmanuelle Roux (review)

Middle English works of moral theology from the late Middle Ages demonstrate measured changes in some of the standard ethical categories (one thinks especially of avarice here, as well as the more recent classifications of the sin of the tongue), but these vernacular works are also testimonies to the influence and creative energy of Latin and French texts from the thirteenth century, especially those written by Dominicans. The first generation of treatises produced to further the proselytizing goals of the Fourth Lateran Council were still of great importance more than a century and a half after their original composition: Raymund of Pennaforte’s Summa de paenitentia (composed ca. 1225–27, revised ca. 1235–36) and William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis (composed ca. 1236), for example, were essential and partially direct influences on Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale. Peraldus’s treatment of the vices also served as a model for the section on the sins in Friar Laurent’s Somme le roi (composed 1279 for the king of France, Philippe le Hardi). Within a generation, the Somme le roi had become, and remained to the end of the Middle Ages, a vitally important foundation of ethical analysis in England, serving as the direct inspiration for a number of Middle English works on moral theology that span a large part of the area of Britain. Its influence can be observed in translations, such as the Ayenbite of Inwyt (completed by Dan Michel of the Northgate in 1340), a very close, literal rendering in the Kentish dialect; The Book of Vices and Virtues (BVV), a more graceful rendering of the Somme from the Southeast Midlands extant in a number of copies (completed around 1375); and Caxton’s Ryal Book, translated from the Somme in 1484. The Somme also inspired adaptations, such as the Speculum vitae, composed in verse in Yorkshire in the third quarter of the fourteenth century; the Book for a Simple and Devout Woman, composed in prose ca. 1400 in the Midlands and derived from both Peraldus’s double Summa on the vices and virtues and Friar Laurent’s Somme; and The Mirroure of the Worlde, a prose translation of the Miroir du monde and Friar Laurent’s work, perhaps by Stephen Scrope, completed around the middle of the fifteenth century in the North Midlands.

All of these texts and further adaptations have been edited, some of them very recently. But the published editions still have not allowed for a full evaluation of the influence of the Somme: six separate and independent translations of discrete parts of the French text into English prose, each generally transmitted in a single codex, have remained accessible in manuscript alone. The unpublished works help demonstrate the remarkable vitality of the Somme in the area of the Midlands in the fifteenth century, a phenomenon that still awaits thorough analysis. Emmanuelle Roux has now announced editions of the five most complete translations, leaving aside only the short English extract of the Somme’s section on learning to die well (chapter 40 in the recent edition of the French text by Brayer and Leurquin-Labie) that is extant in at least three manuscripts. Editions of three of the five lengthier Middle English translations are to be included in Roux’s doctoral dissertation (those in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 1286; Bodleian MS e Museo 23; and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 494). The Middle English renderings of the Somme contained in the present publication are found in two manuscripts in the British Library: Additional 37677 (MS Ad) and Royal 18 A.x (MS R), both from the second half of the fifteenth century. Roux’s plan of editions should, thus, substantially complete the picture of direct English renderings of the Somme in the fifteenth century, and all students of Middle English works on moral theology must be grateful for this. At the...