The Anglo-Norman “Hugo de Lincolnia”: A Critical Edition and Translation from the Unique Text in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 902

This edition makes available a critical text with an annotated translation of the Anglo-Norman verse narrative “Hugo de Lincolnia,” one of the Boy Crucifixion sources of the Prioress’s Tale. The Anglo-Norman text has heretofore been available in print only in a flawed nineteenth-century edition. “Hugo de Lincolnia” dates to the third quarter of the thirteenth century. It is the only extant contemporary vernacular account of the death of “Little Saint Hugh,” a Christian boy said to have been crucified by Lincoln Jews in 1255 in mockery of Christ’s Passion. In its author’s superior familiarity with the Lincoln setting, the poem supplements the better-known contemporary accounts in Latin prose by Matthew Paris and the anonymous monastic chroniclers of Burton and Waverley.