Guillaume de Deguileville

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Guillaume de Deguileville dreaming of celestial Jerusalem (France, 15th century). Songe de Guillaume de Diguleville.jpg
Guillaume de Deguileville dreaming of celestial Jerusalem (France, 15th century).

Guillaume de Deguileville (1295 - before 1358) was a French Cistercian and writer. His authorship is shown by one acrostic in Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, two in Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme , and one in Le Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist. These acrostics take the form of a series of stanzas, each beginning with a letter of Deguileville's name. According to indications in the Vie his father was called Thomas, he was named after his godfather, and his patron saint was William of Chaalis. There is no evidence that his name is connected with a village of Guileville.

Acrostic poem or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or other recurring feature in the text spells out a word or a message

An acrostic is a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The word comes from the French acrostiche from post-classical Latin acrostichis, from Koine Greek ἀκροστιχίς, from Ancient Greek ἄκρος "highest, topmost" and στίχος "verse". As a form of constrained writing, an acrostic can be used as a mnemonic device to aid memory retrieval.

Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme is a fourteenth-century poem written in Old French by Guillaume de Deguileville. A modern edition was published by the Roxburghe Club as Le Pèlerinage de l’Ame de Guillaume de Deguileville, edited by J. J. Stürzinger.

Saint Guillaume de Donjeon was a French Roman Catholic prelate who served as the Archbishop of Bourges from 1200 until his death. He served as a canon in Soissons and Paris before he entered the Order of Grandmont. Sometime later he entered the Cistercians. He was known to practice austerities such as abstaining from meat and wearing a hair shirt.

Contents

Life and writings

Guillaume entered the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis in 1316, at the age of twenty-one. This is in agreement with his assertion in the second redaction of the Vie, where he states that he has been in the abbey for thirty-nine years. The abbey of Chaalis—or what is left of it, for it is no more than a ruin nowadays—is in the diocese of Senlis, north of Paris, and was founded in the twelfth century. A manuscript of a French prose rendering of the Âme states that Guillaume eventually became prior of Chaalis, but it is not known whether this is true or, if so, when this happened.

According to the second redaction of the Vie, Guillaume was thirty-six years old when he wrote his first redaction in 1330, so he must have been born ca. 1294. The Âme was written immediately after the second redaction of the Vie (1355), and in it he states that he was over 60 years old when writing the Âme. He also refers to a passage in the Vie which only occurs in the second redaction of the poem, which is another indication that he wrote the Âme after 1355. Guillaume wrote this second redaction of the Vie, he states in its prologue, because the first redaction had been stolen. This does not mean that this first redaction was lost to posterity, for, according to Clubb in the introduction of his edition of Egerton 615, J. J. Stürzinger based his edition of Vie on it.

We can date Deguileville’s poems as follows: The first version of the Vie was written between 1330 and 1332; the second version of it around 1355; the Âme between 1355 and 1358; and Jhesucrist about 1358. Some seventy-three manuscripts of Guillaume’s works, including forty-six of the Âme, are extant in various libraries in Europe. The only edition of Guillaume’s three poems is that of Stürzinger, who based his edition of the Vie on the first redaction. The second redaction has never been edited.

Although the surviving manuscripts of the Pèlerinage trilogy render the author's name as "Guillaume de Deguileville", a number of other variants can be found in both medieval and modern sources. [1] One alternative spelling is Guillaume de Deguilleville. [2] [3] Modernized form Guillaume de Digulleville is also used. [4] [1] A different interpretation of the surname gives Guillaume de Guileville or Guillaume de Guilleville. [5] The Latin version of the name is Guillermus de Deguilevilla. [4] [5]

English translations

It was not until the 15th century that the first two parts of the Pèlerinage trilogy, Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine and Pèlerinage de l'Âme, appeared in English. [2] The Pilgrimage of the Soul , anonymous but sometimes attributed to John Lydgate or Thomas Hoccleve, is known at least 10 complete and 3 partial manuscripts. [6] The date for the translation is omitted in some manuscripts, and given as either 1400 or 1413 in others, one specifically saying it "endeth in the vigyle of Seynt Bartholomew", that is, August 24. This last quote, with 1413 dating, is also repeated in the first printed edition published by William Caxton in 1483.

The Pilgrimage of the Soul or The Pylgremage of the Sowle was a late medieval work in English, combining prose and lyric verse, translated from Guillaume de Deguileville's Old French Le Pèlerinage de l'Âme. It circulated in manuscript in fifteenth-century England, and was among the works printed by William Caxton. One manuscript forms part of the Egerton Collection in the British Library.

John Lydgate monk and poet

John Lydgate of Bury was a monk and poet, born in Lidgate, near Haverhill, Suffolk, England.

Thomas Hoccleve British writer

Thomas Hoccleve or Occleve was an English poet and clerk who has been seen as a key figure in 15th-century Middle English literature.

However, a considerably older English version of one fragment is known. Geoffrey Chaucer's poem ABC is in fact a translation of a prayer to Virgin Mary from Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine. The form of the translation, closely modelled on that of the French original, is a particular type of an alphabetical poem. Both acrostics are composed of 23 stanzas, 12-lines-long in Guillaume's case and 8-lines-long in Chaucer's, each stanza beginning with letters from A to Z in order (J, U, and W excluded). While its precise date is not known, it is certainly a 14th-century work, pre-dating Chaucer's death in 1400; it may even be one of his earliest works, although this can not be proved conclusively. The main evidence comes from the Second Chaucer edition published by Thomas Speght in 1602. According to Speght, the poem was written, "some say", by the order of Blanche, duchess of Lancaster, the mother of King Henry IV. If this story is indeed a record of a genuine medieval tradition, the poem would have been written in 1368 at the latest, as Blanche died that year. This would make ABC Chaucer's earliest work, preceding The Book of the Duchess , an elegy commemorating Blanche's death. [3]

Geoffrey Chaucer English poet

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet and author. Widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, he is best known for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer has been styled the "Father of English literature" and was the first writer buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

An abecedarius is a special type of acrostic in which the first letter of every word, strophe or verse follows the order of the letters in the alphabet.

In poetry, a stanza is a grouped set of lines within a poem, usually set off from other stanzas by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, though stanzas are not strictly required to have either. Even though the term "stanza" is taken from Italian, in the Italian language the word "strofa" is more commonly used. There are many unique forms of stanzas. Some stanzaic forms are simple, such as four-line quatrains. Other forms are more complex, such as the Spenserian stanza. Fixed verse poems, such as sestinas, can be defined by the number and form of their stanzas. The term stanza is similar to strophe, though strophe sometimes refers to irregular set of lines, as opposed to regular, rhymed stanzas.

Edition

The Roxburghe Club is an exclusive bibliophilic and publishing society based in the United Kingdom.

ABC

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References

  1. 1 2 Kamath 2012, p. XIII
  2. 1 2 Gray 2003, entry for "Deguilleville, Guillaume de"
  3. 1 2 Gray 2003, entry for "ABC"
  4. 1 2 Nievergelt and Kamath 2013, p. 1
  5. 1 2 "Guillaume de Digulleville (1295?-1380?)". data.bnf.fr (fr) . Bibliothèque nationale de France . Retrieved 3 October 2017.
  6. ↑ "The Pilgrimage of the Soule". Archives de littérature du Moyen Âge (ARLIMA). Retrieved 4 October 2017.

Sources


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