5 - The Chanson d’Aspremont in Bodmer 11 and Plantagenet Propaganda

Summary

Charlemagne was the great symbol of the political aspirations of the Capetians as they struggled to consolidate their hold over their far-flung and rebellious vassals. When English kings sought legendary precursors to support their territorial ambitions, they turned instead to Arthur. Benedictine monks practiced the lectio divina or, when they descended to earthly literary pursuits, composed elaborate Ovidian homoerotic Latin poetry. All three of these statements would command considerable support among medievalists. Yet the presence of what is arguably a Plantagenet celebration of Charlemagne, a carefully edited copy of La Chanson d’Aspremont, now Cologny, Bodmer 11, in an English Benedictine monastery, St Augustine’s, Canterbury, suggests an alternate literary history. In this history, English monks work hard to prepare and preserve a chanson de geste; Charlemagne serves to strengthen the resolve of thirteenth-century English rulers; and a text that might have once have been considered to belong to French literature is returned to its original Anglo-Norman milieu and assigned a significant role in the English political struggles of the day.

Long before the Conquest, the phenomenally wealthy Benedictine abbey of St Augustine’s, Canterbury had amassed one of the finest libraries in all England. At its height, the abbey housed over 1,900 books, 300 of them still extant. The bulk of the abbey's collection was composed of religious texts, but there were also a certain number of chronicles and prophecies, as well as thirty-four books in French: a copy of Brunetto Latini's encyclopaedia, Li livres dou tresor, popular religious texts such as Laurent d’Orlean's Somme le roi and Grosseteste's Chasteau d’Amour, and several chansons de geste and romances. We are singularly well informed about this collection because St Augustine's had developed a system to encourage elderly brothers to make sure that after their deaths their books, whether ones they had purchased themselves, been given or borrowed from the abbey's huge library, came back into the main collection. The books were duly noted in the library catalogue, Dublin, Trinity College, 360 with, at least in some cases, an entry ‘de acquisitione fratris defuncti’ copied into the book itself. The catalogue, in the careful and monumental edition by B. C. Barker-Benfield, offers a remarkable picture of St Augustine's and its books.