1 - The Gloss to Philippe de Thaon's Comput and the French of England's Beginnings

Summary

Among the many subjects Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has touched in her career thus far, the French of England has been molded by her most of all. In her honor, this chapter explores the implications of one manuscript of Le Comput by Philippe de Thaon for our understanding of where the French of England came from, how it was first received and what it had to do with earlier written English. An incredible six whole or partial copies of Le Comput survive from the twelfth century, more than any other text except the various French-language versions of the Psalter. It would be rash to call Le Comput the most popular original French-language work of the twelfth century, but certainly it epitomized, along with the French Psalter, the kind of text that scribes frequently committed to parchment and later readers preserved. As such it possesses a remarkable but largely unexplored importance in the history of written French.

Cambridge, University Library, MS Additional 4166, Fragment 9, is our earliest witness to Philippe's text and contains a fragmentary copy of Le Comput, glossed in Latin. Long considered to be from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, the manuscript was reassigned to the first half of the twelfth century by Maria Careri, Christine Ruby and Ian Short in their Livres et écritures en français et en occitan au XIIe siècle: catalogue illustré. That revision makes the Cambridge fragment one of only seven surviving French-language manuscripts produced in England before the middle of the twelfth century and a unique example of an extensive Latin gloss on a French-language manuscript before 1200.

The Cambridge fragment's peculiar layout, where Latin glosses French and not the other way around, invites us to rethink the relationship between different languages in Philippe's writing and to broaden our critical conceptions of the meaning of the romance vernacular in the first half of the twelfth century. Frameworks that explain language choice by means of the prestige or inherent authority of one language vis-à-vis another cannot explain the form of the Cambridge fragment or the content and style of Le Comput as a whole.