4 - Women and Werewolves: William of Palerne in Three Cultures

Summary

William of Palerne, otherwise known more engagingly as William and the Werewolf, survives in Middle English in only one manuscript, but it was much more widely known than that would suggest. The romance was originally composed in continental French in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, for a ‘countess Yolande’, probably a countess of Hainault who died c. 1212. The mid-fourteenth-century Middle English translation – and despite its chosen form of alliterative rather than rhymed verse, it frequently comes closer to being a translation than the kind of free adaptation made of many French or Anglo-Norman romances into English – was composed, as the translator (himself called William) tells us, for a grandson of Edward I, Humphrey de Bohun, sixth earl of Hereford, who died in 1361. Both these versions, the French and the English, were printed in prose renderings in the sixteenth century. The French prose, based on the original Guillaume, was produced some time before 1535, and went through a number of editions into the seventeenth century. It was preceded by the English prose, printed around 1515 by Wynkyn de Worde complete with woodcuts. This survives in the form of only two leaves from near the end of the story, though that is sufficient to demonstrate that, exceptionally among prose romances, it was based on the Middle English poem, not on any French version. Those leaves are also enough to show that it was the immediate source of the Irish Eachtra Uilliam, ‘the deeds of William’ (or, as one might put it in a more medieval formulation, the Gesta Guilielmi). It was composed probably towards the end of the sixteenth century for the high-ranking Anglo-Irish Dillon family of county Mayo. This version too is predominantly in prose but, like many Irish romances, it also contains a number of inset lais such as are recurrently found in other Irish romances, but apparently never elsewhere in one translated from another language. All of these, except for the French prose, survive in only a single copy. The rest of this chapter will focus primarily on three of those various texts, the octosyllabic French, the alliterative English, and the prose with interspersed verse of the Irish; but, taken together with the printed prose versions, they indicate how attractive the story was found across a range of cultures, languages, and prosodic forms into the early modern period.