La Vye de Seynt Fraunceys D'Assise (review)

The publication of this edition of the Vye de Seynt Fraunceys is a very welcome addition to the Anglo Norman Text Society series, making another substantial and important Anglo-Norman verse saint's life available to scholars and students. This text is of interest both as a representative of Anglo-Norman hagiography, which has been receiving increasing attention in the study of laywomen's reading and patronage, and because of the great significance of its subject, Francis of Assisi, for the study of medieval religious history.

Within a very short time of the creation of the first biographies in Latin of Francis of Assisi, the story of his life began to be written down in the European vernaculars. Possibly the earliest of these vernacular texts were the two long poems in French found in MSS Paris BNF ffr 19531 and Paris BNF ffr 2094, written between 1235 and 1266. Both of these were based on the first official Latin biography of St Francis, the Vita Prima by Thomas of Celano. The Anglo-Norman text published here is a translation of Bonaventure's Legenda Maior, which superseded the earlier Latin vitae as the Franciscan order's official biography of its founder, and is the only other major verse life of the saint in French to survive. With the appearance of this edition, all three of these texts are now published, although the early twentieth-century edition of the text from BNF ffr 19531 is not easily accessible, and a new edition would be a worthwhile project.

This edition has been a long time coming. As Delbert Russell mentions in his preface, he has continued the work begun in the 1970s by Robert Harden and Frank Collins, but never completed. With access to their notes, he has made a new transcription of the manuscript himself, and has been able to draw on the scholarship on Franciscan hagiography that has appeared in the intervening years (including my own PhD thesis, for which the original editors, Harden and Collins, kindly allowed me access to their transcription and notes).

Delbert Russell is an accomplished and experienced scholar of Anglo-Norman hagiographic texts, with two editions of saints' lives already to his credit: the edition of the Vie de Seint Laurent he did for his doctoral dissertation, and the Vie de seynt Richard de Cycestre (no. 51) in the ANTS series. Following the ANTS format, he gives an informative introduction that contains a description of the manuscript and a detailed analysis of the language of the text noting new words and unusual formations, which together with the glossary and index of proper names, provides a useful resource for students of Anglo-Norman. In addition, the introduction contains a brief account of the historical and literary context, giving a summary of Francis's life and the early history of the Franciscan order, the production of the earliest biographies by Thomas of Celano and Julian of Speyer and their supplanting by Bonaventure's Legenda Maior, and a list of Old French translations of Latin lives. Anyone interested in the early hagiography of Saint Francis in French will find the major references here, although they will have to go to the references themselves if they want to know about its transmission in other European languages. A discussion of this wider transmission would have been outside the edition's scope, but given the English origins of this text, it would have been useful to have some indication of the treatment of the life of Francis in Middle English.

Saints' lives differ from other vernacular narrative texts in that they usually have an identifiable Latin source, which they treat with varying degrees of freedom, so it is essential to know what the relationship of the vernacular text is to its source before making judgements about the way it treats its subject. Russell's introduction gives a clear idea of the relationship of the Anglo-Norman text to...