Prose Brut to 1332 <i>Prose Brut to 1332</i> . Edited by H <scp>eather</scp> P <scp>agan</scp> . (Anglo-Norman Texts, 69). Manchester: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2011. xiv + 280 pp.

Heather Pagan's edition of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut chronicle to 1332 is a welcome addition to prose Brut scholarship. The prose Brut recounts the history of England from its mythical foundation to contemporary rulers. The Oldest Version, written in Anglo-Norman, ends with the death of King Henry III in 1272. The history was continued at later points to the reigns of Edward I and his successors. The prose Brut was quickly translated from French into English and was the most popular secular text circulating in later medieval England. Pagan's edition is part of a recent surge of scholarly interest in the chronicle, after a long period of critical neglect. The edition presents a prose Brut text ending in 1332 found in a group of three closely related manuscripts that share many of the same contents, most notably the verse version of Des Grantz Geanz and Robert of Avesbury's Latin chronicle. They belong to a larger category of Anglo-Norman prose Brut manuscripts known as the Short Version (to be distinguished from the Long Version). Little work has been done on the Short Version and it ‘does not form a homogeneous group of texts’ (p. 3). Pagan sensibly selects London, British Library, MS Harley 200 (late fourteenth-century) as the base text for her very well-presented edition, as it is ‘the earliest and the source of the other two’ (p. 10). Variant readings are listed after the edited text. The volume assumes a fair degree of familiarity with Anglo-Norman. Discussions of morphology and orthography appear in the Introduction, and, in lieu of a translation, a selective glossary includes ‘words considered to be rare, or used in an atypical manner’ (p. 242). Newcomers to the prose Brut will benefit from the concise introductory overview of the development of the Anglo-Norman chronicle, complemented by discussions of sources and authorship (and by explanatory notes towards the end of the volume). Pagan draws throughout on Lister M. Matheson's pioneering study The Prose Brut: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998). However, she rarely engages with Julia Marvin's The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: An Edition and Translation (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), especially Marvin's edition and translation of the Oldest Version, which Pagan, following Matheson, refers to as the ‘Common Text’ (pp. 2, 3, etc.). Such engagement would have helped readers determine how Pagan's conclusions compare with, and how her work can be seen to build on, Marvin's, especially since both editors cover much of the same ground, and since their findings are not always consistent (for example, their counts of Anglo-Norman prose Brut and Short Version manuscripts differ). There are a few minor errors (five, not two, Short Version manuscripts lack the linking passage between Des Grantz Geanz and the prose Brut; see Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, ed. by Ruth J. Dean (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999), p. 26), but these do not detract from the value of Pagan's edition, which will certainly facilitate future scholarship on the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, the Short Version in particular. It opens doors for fuller studies of the prose Brut to 1332 and for wider investigations of the revisions and continuations that shape Anglo-Norman prose Brut texts.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.