In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Jean Gerson's Exemplaire des petis enfans, a 'scripted object* preserved in Spencer M S 17 of the New York Public Library A Middle French text entitled L'Exemplaire des petis enfans is extant as one 'scripted object' amongst six other finely scripted and illuminated medieval texts that are contained in Spencer M S 17 of the N e w York Public Library. Although his name is neither mentioned in the manuscript itself nor in the catalogue of the Spencer collection of the N e w York Public Library, the Exemplaire has been recendy shown beyond question1 to be from the pen of that prolific author, Jean Gerson (1363-1429), Chancellor of the University of Paris from 1395, and an influential churchman w h o was involved in many of the weighty problems—ecclesiatical, aulic and academic—of his age. Gerson's works, written in both Latin and French, fill ten solid volumes in the recent edition by M g r Glorieux.2 The latter, in the course of a biographical essay on this eminent French writer and preacher, notes that the Exemplaire des petis enfans should be addedtothe list of works composed by Gerson, around the period 1400-01, especially for ordinary folk (pour les simples gens), but that unfortunately no copy of the treatise is extant.3 The nineteen short divisions of the text (exemples) give answers to such questions as, inter alia, why children should go to church each Sunday, why people who believe in sorcery are punished by God, and why one should never lie to or keep anything back from one's confessor. It is clear that the Exemplaire constitutes a serious and practical pedagogicaltext,and sofitsin well with the other six texts to be found in the Spencer codex, all of which are of a basically moral, even didactic, nature. In the order they appear in Spencer 17, the texts are: Jean de Meun's 1 M. J. Walkley, 'L'exemplaire des petits enfants: un texte de Jean Gerson qu'on croyait perdu', in Romania 104 (1983), 538-45; also 'Pommes escriptes et brevez estranges: Forbidden fruit in fifteenth-century France', in New Zealand Journal of French Studies 5 (1984), 51-61, and 'The Audience of Jean Gerson's Exemplaire despetits enfants', in Padagogica Historica ns 28 (1992), 61-74. 2 P. Glorieux (ed.), Jean Gerson. (Euvres completes, 10 vols, Paris, 1960-73. 3 Ibid., vol. 1(1960), p. 114: Peut-Stre faudrait-il y ajouter aussi L'exemplaire des petits enfants qui semble perdu. P A R E R G O N ns 13.2, January 1996—Text, Scribe, Artefact 152 M. J. Walkley translation of Boethius' Consolatio philosophiae; La voye purgative, illuminative et unitive; St Augustine's Contemplations; Histoire du miroi du corps et de I'dme; Dialogue du pere et du fils sur VAntichrist, L'Exemplaire des petis enfans; Christine de Pisan's Livre du corps de la policie, savoir du regime des princes, des nobles et du peuple* The aim of this paper is to show h o w the text of the N e w York Exemplaire escaped identification with Gerson's 'lost text' for a longer time than might have been expected. Apart from the fact that the manuscript containing ourtextoffers it anonymously, there are several aspects of the physical presentation and ornamentation of the Exemplaire in Spencer 17 which doubtless contributed to keeping its true contents veiled for so long from the scrutiny of European and American scholars. Because the whole manuscript was finely crafted, offering elaborate illuminations and calligraphy, it must always have had the status of a beautiful 'scripted object', worthy of taking its place amongst the treasures of wealthy persons, and in fact it has mostly belonged—in so much as it is a precious and so negotiable object—to therichand powerful. For this reason, its history can in fact be traced fairly easily, both through annotations made to the manuscript itself over the centuries and through consultation of sales catalogues. That it was scripted and illuminated in thefirstplace, about 1450, for a member of the Rohan-Visconti families, is evident from their quartered arms which appear in the initial letters of each of...

pdf

Share