7 - The Presentation of Audience and the Later life of the Prologue

Summary

TO LAUD AND Inglisman I spell | Þat vnderstandes þat I tell’, declares the Cursor Mundi, in a couplet which appears in all manuscripts containing this prologue. The stated audience for this text remains constant throughout its manuscript history: Englishmen and the ‘lewed’, the manuscripts agree, will benefit most from this work. However, in some manuscripts the original prologue has been altered by later readers. A number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century copies omit the lines in which the narrator complains about the prevalence of ‘Frankis rimes […] wroght for frankis man’. Making their copies of the Cursor Mundi during a period where francophone literature would indeed have been less ‘Comunlik’ read ‘in ilk[a] sted’, it would appear as though later redactors of the text felt such statements to be unnecessary or even irrelevant. This example illustrates the shifting relationship between prologues and their audiences: an author may use a prologue to define his audience as a particular group, and to state that he is directing his text towards their needs; however, if the needs of that group change (or indeed if another group entirely should become interested in the text), audiences may in turn choose to alter the prologue, thereby redefining the text in accordance with the way they read it.

We will now turn to those for whom the translations were intended, and examine the relationship between prologues and their audiences. This is explored in two ways. First, I discuss the statements made about audience in the prologues. The term ‘audience’ will be used here in a broad sense to mean all recipients of a text, although the way the term keeps oral delivery in mind is one of its advantages. In their provision of a directional framework for the reader or listener, prologues are the most direct link between text and audience; the descriptions they contain of those who will read or hear the work therefore act as a mirror held up to those who will benefit from them. Second, I consider the way in which prologues themselves can be altered by later readers and scribes, by means of interpolated or omitted lines, to reflect changing audience needs. This last makes a logical conclusion to my study of the English material, being an investigation into the later life of translators’ prologues.