International Medieval Society, Paris • Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2010 - Traditio
Abstract

Translating Genealogical Histories for the Counts of Dreux: the Chronique de Normandie and Geste de France (c.1215-1225)

Gregory Fedorenko, Cambridge University

This paper deals with two Old French prose genealogical histories found in numerous manuscripts of the thirteenth century: the Chronique de Normandie, an abridgement of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum; and the Geste de France, a revision of the Saint-Denis-produced Abbreviatio Gestorum Franciae Regum. These French texts offer interesting evidence about how royal genealogies were appreciated by early thirteenth-century audiences keen to find out about the past but lacking knowledge of Latin. Both have so far been neglected by historians, the Geste de France remaining unedited and the Chronique de Normandie only extant in an 1839 edition that missed several important manuscripts. This is a pity, as the various versions of these texts show how they were enlarged and adapted over time from the earliest translation of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum and Abbreviatio Gestorum Franciae Regum into French.

This paper will deal with the earliest extant versions of both texts, found together in Paris, Bibl. Nationale ms. fr.10130. This manuscript, produced at the abbey of Saint-Yved de Braine in the early thirteenth century, allows us the closest access to the point at which both Chronique and Geste made the leap from Latin to French. Comparing these translations with the Latin originals provides an account of what were considered to be the most important topics for transmission, and which areas were abridged or written out entirely. The answers to these questions are not identical in the case of both texts. As both were written in the immediate aftermath of the annexation of Normandy by Philip Augustus (1204), the superiority of the Capetian monarchy over its Anglo-Norman neighbours is interestingly replicated in the relationship between the Geste and Chronique. This paper will argue that this fact in turn replicates the early thirteenth-century political concerns of the House of Dreux: patrons of the Abbey of Saint-Yved, cadet members of the Capetian royal house and loyal combatants in the struggle with the Angevin Dukes of Normandy.