A thirteenth-century bilingual hand: Matthew Paris and the Anglo-Norman Vie de Seint Auban
Abstract. This paper aims to explore the differences in Matthew Paris’s script in Anglo-Norman and Latin, taking the Vie de Seint Auban, the Chronica Majora and fragments of Paris’s Latin hagiographies as examples. The digital analysis of script using Archetype, together with a look at the role genre, audience and usage play in relation to script will help answer if, how and why Paris’s hand changes across languages.
Matthew Paris (c.1200-1259), monk at St Albans Abbey (England), is best known for authoring – and illuminating – a number of historical works including the Chronica Majora and the Historia Anglorum, as well as other texts in genres such as poetry compilations, astrology and hagiography. Remarkably, many of these texts are found in autograph manuscripts, which allows us to study Paris’s works not only from an authorial but from a palaeographic perspective. The study of his hand, its evolution through time and the hands of those that collaborated with him in the making of the manuscripts have been the subject of works by R. Vaughan, the editors of the Rolls editions of Paris’s works, S. Lewis, N. Greasley and myself, among others.
It is within the genre of hagiography that we find Paris writing full works not only in Latin but also in Anglo-Norman. In Latin, he wrote the Vita Stephani archiepiscopi Cantuarensis on Stephen Langton, and the Vita beati Edmundi on St Edmund the Confessor. The Life of Stephen Langton survives in three fragments, whereas the Life of St Edmund only survives in a later copy. Interestingly, however, most of his known works of hagiography were written in Anglo-Norman: The Vie de Seint Thomas de Cantorbéry survives in a fragmentary fashion, whereas the Vie de Seint Aedward le Rei survives in a later copy. The Vie de Seint Auban, now Trinity College Dublin MS 177, is the only of Paris’s Anglo-Norman hagiographies to survive in an autograph manuscript.
The manuscript of the Vie de Seint Auban stands out for its illumination, carried out by Paris himself together with the text. Chronologically, this codex is considered the earliest containing Paris’s hand, together with the Chronica Majora in what I have named Group I, produced between c.1240 and 1250, or possibly earlier. Evidence for this comes from the study of the evolution of Paris’s hand, carried out using the digital tool Archetype, which compared features of letterforms, abbreviation and punctuation across ten of Paris’s manuscripts. However, the singularity of the Life of St Alban is its language: how does the hand in the Vie and in the Chronica Majora compare? Does it change at all? In what ways?
Through digital means such as Archetype we will dive into the key characteristics of Paris’s hand in both the Vie de Seint Auban and the Chronica Majora, with the aim of finding out differences and similarities. Simultaneously, comparisons between the Vie and Paris’s Latin hagiographies will also help untangle how genre and manuscript use inform script. The intersection between script, genre, audience and usage will allow us to gain a better understanding of Matthew Paris as a bilingual scribe.