The Life of Saint Clement: A Translation of La Vie de seint Clement trans. by Daron Burrows, and; The Works of Chardri: Three Poems in the French of Thirteenth-Century England: The Life of the Seven Sleepers, The Life of St. Josaphaz and The Little Debate trans. by Neil Cartlidge (review)

The French of England Translation Series (FRETS), edited by Thelma Fenster and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, now numbers ten volumes in print, and counting. This series offers careful and readable translations of Anglo-Norman literary texts into modern, idiomatic English prose. An important body of writings is thereby made available to new categories of readers interested in this literature but lacking Anglo-Norman fluency. The selection of published texts reflects, moreover, the series editors' interest in rarely studied works composed mainly after 1200. Short excerpts from the texts are provided in appendices, giving at least a taste of the original phraseology.

The two volumes here under review exemplify the series program. Primacy in both is given to the saint's-life genre. The texts, composed in the middle of the thirteenth century, offer syntheses of romance entertainment and devotional piety, characteristic of Anglo-Norman vernacular hagiography. The Life of Saint Clement, the more massive, bookish example, is translated by Daron Burrows, who also edited it for the Anglo-Norman Text Society (3 vols., 2007–10). The three works by Chardri are translated by Neil Cartlidge, who draws on critical editions by Brian Merrilees and on his own previous studies. Both translators successfully face the challenge of reconciling word-by-word accuracy with readability, conveying something of the brilliance of the Anglo-Norman verse style.

The Life of Saint Clementis a monumental representative of thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman verse hagiography. Nearly 15,000 lines long, incomplete even so in the sole surviving manuscript, the poem is a compilation drawn from three sources: the Recognitiones Clementis, the Epistula Clementis ad Iacobumof Rufinus of Aquileia, and the Passio Petri et Pauliof Pseudo Marcellus. The Recognitionestradition provides an adventure narrative framing doctrinal disputations and sermons, judiciously selected by the versifier, who also provides a remarkable 118-line prologue apologizing for the vernacular as a vehicle for religious instruction.

In the Introduction to his translation, Burrows offers a survey of linguistic and literary aspects of the poem, supported by an exhaustive bibliography. The true focus of the Saint Clement, Burrows observes, is actually not Clement himself but rather St. Peter, whose disputations against the wicked Simon Magus occupy much of the latter half of the poem. Turning to the question of the poem's sources, Burrows traces the Latin pseudo-Clementine tradition back to the fifth-century Recognitionesand the Epistula, both translated from the Greek by Rufinus of Aquileia; Burrows cautiously analyzes the possibility of intermediate sources. Another question of authorship is prompted by the situation of the poem in the sole surviving (incomplete) manuscript, where it is preceded by a Life of Saint John the Almsgiverand followed by the Latin prose Passio Petri et Pauli, the immediate source of the Passiomaterial in the final 500 lines of our poem. A very thorough comparison of linguistic evidence leads Burrows to find that the authors of the Saint Clementand the Saint Johnwere one and the same.

The Prologue to the poem should...