Three Anglo-Norman Kings: The Lives of William the Conqueror and Sons by Benoît de Sainte-Maure (review)

This translation of a significant portion of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Histoire des ducs de Normandie is a very welcome resource for scholars of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historiography. Benoît, author of the Roman de Troie (c. 1165), was apparently commissioned by Henry II of England to produce a grand history of the Norman dukes following the fall from favour of Wace, to whom that task had initially been entrusted. The full text of the Histoire — drawn largely from the final version of the Latin prose Gesta Normannorum Ducum, as completed by Robert de Torigni between 1137 and 1139 — runs to 44,544 lines, a length that, along with the lack of a modern English translation, has kept it from reaching a wider readership. The leading Anglo-Norman scholar Ian Short has chosen to translate only the final quarter of the history here, an 11,000-line account of the lives of William the Conqueror and his heirs. A full translation of the Histoire would of course be desirable, as Short acknowledges; the tight focus on a period of great interest to many historians and literary scholars is, however, an eminently sensible approach that will doubtless achieve Short’s aim of drawing more attention to this overlooked work. While Short does not overstate Benoît’s legacy, noting in his Introduction that the Histoire’s ‘influence does not extend far beyond the prose Bruts of the fourteenth century’ (p. 20), he makes a strong case for the poet’s literary talents of amplification and expansion, which are most evident in the episodes translated here. Short’s translation is based upon Carin Fahlin’s edition (Chronique des ducs de Normandie par Benoît, 4 vols (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1951–79) of the earliest of the two extant copies of the Histoire (Tours, BM, MS 903: roughly contemporary with Benoît’s original), amended with variant forms, where Short feels it necessary, that are drawn from an edition of the other surviving manuscript, an early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman copy (London, BL, MS Harley 1717) as edited by Francisque Michel (Chroniques des ducs de Normandie par Benoît, 3 vols (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1836–44)). The approach here is similar to that employed in Short’s ground-breaking translation and edition of Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): lively, highly readable, and more concerned with capturing what Short considers to be ‘Benoît’s exceptional powers of poetic expression’ (p. 26) than with a strictly literal rendition of the source text. For those engaged in close reading, Short’s thorough linguistic and literary notes on the translated material will prove indispensable in tandem with Fahlin’s edition. All readers will benefit from the helpful table of contents, index of proper names, detailed bibliography, and twenty-six-page Introduction, which presents Benoît and the culture within which he worked, provides an insightful analysis of his compositional methods and style, contextualizes him both within the traditions of the medieval art of rewriting more generally and those of Anglo-Norman historiography in particular, and assesses the Histoire’s reception and impact. Short’s translation is another valuable contribution from a scholar whose work in this area is second to none. It belongs in the libraries of all those with an interest in the literature and language of the Anglo-Norman world.