La Vie de Seint Clement, I: Text (1-7006), and: La Vie de Seint Clement, II: Text (7007-end), and: La Vie de Seint Clement, III: Introduction, Notes and Glossary (review)

La Vie de Seint Clement is an Anglo-Norman poem of some fifteen thousand lines of octosyllabic couplets, composed in the first half of the thirteenth century and preserved in a single manuscript from the middle of that century: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.46, fols 122-357^v. The bulk of the text is an adaptation of the Recognitiones sancti Clementi by Rufinus of Aquileia (AD 410), whose work is a translation of a Greek text, attributed to a Christian writer from Alexandria, perhaps from the third century, but purporting to be by Clement in the first century. The manuscript volume is the work of two scribes and contains two other texts to which La Vie de Seint Clement is thematically related: The Life of Saint John the Almsgiver (fols 1-121^v) and the Passio sanctorum Petri et Pauli (fols 358-72^v). Close textual comparison between La Vie and The Life leads the editor to suppose that these two Anglo-Norman texts were composed by the same person (III, 47), and that 'there is good reason to relate their composition to the drive for religious instruction resulting from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215' (ibid.). To this one could add the desire of Innocent III to assert the credentials of the man considered to have been the first Apostolic Father of the Church. Two useful editions of the text have previously been produced (N. K. Willson, 'Critical Edition of the Vie de Saint Clement Pape' (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 1951) and La Vie de Seint Clement, pape, online edition by D. W. Russell (Waterloo, ON: University of Waterloo, 2007)), assisting Burrows to provide a text in volumes I and II that meets the highest standards of accuracy and rigorous scholarship. Volume III begins with a description of the text's language and versification, an examination of the anonymous author's handling of his source material, and a reconstruction of his personal background. It then offers an exhaustive set of Notes, a Glossary, and an Index of Proper Names. The editor's description of the language and versification follows the standard Anglo-Norman Text Society pattern. There is a slightly ritualistic aspect to linguistic descriptions such as these, and it is hard to derive from them a clear sense of the text's linguistic distinctiveness. However, in this case the work is executed with more than the usual thoroughness. Later in the volume, Burrows points to highly interesting similarities between the language of his text and that of The Life of Saint John the Almsgiver. Can it be demonstrated that a comparison with other contemporary Anglo-Norman devotional texts would not have revealed analogous, if different, similarities? With medieval vernacular texts we are confronted above all with quantitative differences in the distribution of particular linguistic variables. Burrows is especially interested in the author's treatment of his sources, both as an adapter and as a translator. The first of these is very adequately dealt with, backed up by a useful summary table in the Appendix. The second of these — micro-level translation problems — occupy a fair proportion of the Notes. The Index of Proper Names is exhaustive, though not always sufficiently explicit: where, for instance, are 'Caesarea Stratonis', 'Laodicea', 'Serica', 'Susis', and who were 'Anaxagoras', 'Anaximandarus', 'Asclepiades', etc.? Should the reader have to look elsewhere for clarification? The Notes and Glossary are superbly executed, and it is difficult to add anything constructive: asené (l. 10723...