Les traductions françaises du De regimine principum de Gilles de Rome: parcours matériel, culturel et intellectuel d’un discours sur l’éducation (review)

Over the last quarter-century a growing body of scholarship has started to reveal the profound influence of Giles of Rome, archbishop of Bourges, and his œuvre on the intellectual culture of later medieval and early Renaissance Europe. Of all the vast output of philosophical and theological works ascribed to Giles, however, it was his book of political advice for rulers, De regimine principum, that had the greatest impact. Composed originally in Latin c. 1279 and dedicated to Philip the Fair of France, De regimine had immediate and long-lasting success, becoming the period’s second most copied and translated work of political-advice literature after the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum. De regimine’s skillful use and adaptation of Aristotle’s moral philosophy and Rhetoric made the Latin original a veritable bestseller among learned clerics, but it also secured a large lay audience—especially among the rulers and aristocrats to whom it was ostensibly directed. To satisfy these readers’ demand, several vernacular translations were made in almost all the languages of Western Europe.

Nowhere, it seems, was lay demand greater than in France, the birthplace of De regimine. Here, as Noëlle-Laetitia Perret demonstrates in what is the first major study of the French De regimine, the text was first translated by Henri de Gauchi at the request of Philip the Fair and proliferated in thirty-six (extant) copies. It was followed by six translations (each surviving in a single manuscript) over the next 180 years or so. Perret’s study is at once a history of textual reception, a histoire du livre, and a history of education. Its introductory chapter gives a succinct but useful biography of Giles, followed by discussions of De regimine’s place in the long medieval tradition of Mirrors of Princes literature, of its contents and structure, and of its importance as a vehicle for the medieval reception of Aristotelian moral philosophy. Part 3 of this three-part study describes the forty-two manuscripts that are the bulk of the raw material used by Perret to fashion the other two parts. These are devoted to, first, a discussion of the translations and their owners and readers, and, second, to a close analysis of Giles’s doctrine of education as developed in book 2 of De regimine as well as to the seven translators’ varied responses to the Latin text and presumably the perceived expectations of their intended readers.

Perret’s book will long endure as a key resource for scholars studying the French reception of De regimine specifically and Aristotelian practical philosophy more generally. Thus, the author has made a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature on lay intellectual culture of the later medieval period. Perret also reveals the different strategies employed by several translators. Whereas de Gauchi tried to vulgarize Giles’s own vulgarization of Aristotle’s philosophy through careful abbreviation, most of the other translators took great care to offer their readers translations of the full text; one example is Jean Wauquelin, who tried to mimic Giles’s Latin in his French version. Several translators also were tempted to annotate, sometimes quite extensively, as in the case of one Guillaume, who included favorable remarks about Jewish education in his frequent additions. A different tone is evinced in the glosses of the anonymous translator of Berlin, Staatsbibl. MS Ham. 672, who tried to Christianize what he thought was the too-secular message of the original.