An Epistle of Noble Poetrye

Christine de Pizan's L'Epistre d'Othéa was one of her most popular works, surviving in at least forty-seven manuscripts, some copied in England. Henry IV tried to lure her to England as his court poet, but she politely declined. Her political sympathies were not with the Lancastrian usurper. Her son Jean de Castel had been in the service of John Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, and when the latter was executed after leading a rebellion against Henry IV, Jean was left in a delicate situation. Christine's dedication of a copy of Othéa to Henry IV was perhaps a prudent move designed to extricate her son. He returned safe to France.Othéa and by extension this Middle English translation are of interest for many reasons. The first is that Christine was a remarkable woman. Probably the first professional woman writer in the European West, she ran her own scriptorium and was justly admired as an authority in the field of letters. Her boldness is on display in this work. The overarching fiction is that of an epistle containing wise advice given by the goddess Othéa to Hector of Troy. The gender of Hector's advisor matters. Othea is repeatedly said to speak goddessly (59/14, 64/13)—a word as yet unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary (which recognizes only godly)—and she delivers a preemptive strike against the objection that advice from a woman to a man is useless: remember, says Othéa, that the Sibyl advised the emperor Augustus. A second point of interest lies in the structural design of the work. Othéa's wisdom is delivered in a hundred poems, most of them just quatrains. In the Middle English Harley version, Christine's strophes become rhyme royal stanzas. In his prologue (another innovation in this version), the poet calls the form “balad ryme” (l. 160). As in Christine's original, each of these hundred poems are then glossed in prose—so as to extract the behavioral lesson to be learned from the verses—and then accompanied by a “morality,” which imposes an explicitly Christian moral backed up, at the end, by a pertinent quotation from the Latin Vulgate.Christine's Othéa was translated three times into early English. Stephen Scrope translated it as the Boke of Knyghthode in 1440; there is a later anonymous English version printed by Robert Wyer; and then there is the Epistle of Poetry extant only in Harley 838. Previous editions of the Harley version include editions by James D. Gordon (1942) and the recent edition by Misty Schieberle in the TEAMS series (2020). This new edition certainly adds value. There is an excellent introduction to Christine and her Epistre. Less convincing is the attempt to claim that the Middle English translator added subtlety of his own. As an example the editors offer what they think is a play on the “cognates” (sic) rage and outrage: three times the translator uses the same “-rage-root” (p. xxv). In fact, the suffix of outrage is -age; its root is outre. Of greater value is the thorough discussion of the manuscript which follows. This narrows down the likely period in which the Harley text was copied to a couple of years in the 1490s. The editors demonstrate that the scribe responsible for the whole manuscript (except for some later additions) was probably Anthony Babbington and that the heraldic treatise he wrote in the same manuscript was copied from Harley 2259, compiled by Richard Strangeways. Strangeways had been a member of the Inner Temple, and Babbington was there between 1496 and 1498.The edition is also more useful than its predecessors to readers who are interested in Middle English language. The first editor of Epistle of Poetry, James D. Gordon, regularized the text, as did Schieberle, following TEAMS policy. The editorial practice of Moll, Schuurman, and Pez is to stick to the manuscript except in cases of obvious error. For instance, they keep MS strenghthe, which Schieberle normalized to strengthe. Since strenghthe is a perfectly normal Middle English spelling, this decision makes sense, though by the same token it seems unnecessary to follow Schieberle in emending MS whoum to whom at 87/8 and 87/10. The spellings whou and whoum are commonplace in Early Modern English, and whous is attested in Middle English. More questionable still is the decision to emend MS vnsittyng to vnfittyng and sittyng to fittyng, though the manuscript plainly has an s and not an f. The editors write in a note to the first of the three occasions on which the emendation is made (47/9, 57/3, 60/28) that “we feel that this strains the meaning of (‘vn)sittyng’), and thus emend” (p. 126), but unsitting and unfitting are synonymous in Middle English and so nothing is gained by replacing one with the other. At 86/36, by contrast, the emendation adopted by Schieberle (“thei are” for MS “he is”) is essential, since the text is confusing without it. The corresponding note in the textual apparatus, “he is as] MS, thei are as MS,” (p. 110) adds to the confusion.The text, which has been carefully punctuated by the editors, is eminently readable. The policy of adding an accent to any final -e that corresponds with modern -y is helpful, but has been imperfectly executed: eentre (49/25) and enmes (Pr/115) need the accent, but counstancé (10/6) should not have it (constancy being a sixteenth-century innovation).The section on the language is a weak link. It is largely confined to an itemized linguistic profile (LP) based on the questionnaire list of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) by Angus McIntosh and others. Only a select portion of the text, corresponding roughly to chapters 5–42, however, has been used. Of course, McIntosh and his team also sampled, but having the whole text available electronically should free us from having to form an impression based on a sample. It seems important to note that for the third-person singular this text very occasionally has -s (Pr/19; 62/26) and not just the -th inflections reported in the LP, even if this does not happen in the sample. Moreover, the language of the sample itself is not fully reported either. Under MUCH, the adjective mykyll (15/15) should appear (the glossary misconstrues this as a noun). Forms of WH- (LALME item 44) are not listed. Admittedly, the brief discussion of the LP includes the statement that “our text never exhibits the qw- for wh- forms common to Norfolk” (p. xliii), but this disregards qwhyte (white) at 18/4. Under CALL, the editors duly list forms of call, but seem unaware that this questionnaire item is meant to measure the use of call (more northerly) and clepe (more southerly). Clepyd (7/10) should have been reported. The past participle GIVEN, which should come after GAVE (here misspelt as HAVE), is not reported. The sample has yeven (24/20), and there is also yeve (68/21), but more interesting is gyff (Pr/54). Under MAY, the subentry for the second person is missing. The omission is rectified in the discussion, where it is said that “The scribe also prefers the unattested mey for may as 1st and 3rd person singular and plural. He uses unattested meyst for 2nd person singular” (p. xliii). However, first- and third-person mey for MAY is well attested (see LALME), and the most striking second-person form, mest (35/1), has been overlooked. When Babbington copied Strangeways's “þu nedyst nat say” as “þu nedys nott sey,” the editors focus on the spelling variants and and miss what is much more revealing: the leveling of second- and third-person present in Babbington's language. Note also second-person can (55/6), owes (27/17), and xall (33/5). There is further ammunition here for the editors’ argument that Babbington's language was more northerly than Gordon suggested.The glossary is not extensive, but it provides help where help is needed and is generally sound, with just a few blemishes: nott forthen (3/15) here means “nevertheless,” not “not at all.”soute vppon (22/36) means “become infatuated with” (ME sotten), not “bring a suit against.”wached (28/20) means “watched, kept watch on,” not “awakened.”fell (70/4) means “grievous” (ME fel), not “many” (ME fēle), as the rhyme shows.In conclusion, the greatest strengths of this book lie in the general introduction, the detailed study of the codicological context, and the fidelity to the original Middle English text. This fidelity makes this new edition more suitable than previous ones to readers interested in Middle English philology. Such readers, however, may also notice that the weaknesses of the edition lie in exactly this area: the treatment of language is not as illuminating as the editors’ discussion of the manuscript context

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