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Locating the Past, Chapter Two Language and Culture in BNF Manuscript 375
Lukas
As with my first blog post, I will first summarize my research at the national library, then say a few words about my home and social lives in Paris.
My research has progressed well since the last round of blog posts. Readers may recall that my preliminary goal as a President’s Summer Fellow was to identify the geographic origins of the second text in Ms. BNF 375, a medieval French version of the Apocalypse. I spent my first month in Paris doing just that. I first performed a dialectal analysis to determine the provenance of 375’s copy of Explication. In brief, the copyist wrote in picard, a Northern scripta, or written dialect. However, I also noticed that the text opens with a prologue, and that this prologue exhibits a number of linguistic traits inconsistent with Picard writing. Working under the assumption that the language of the prologue is also that of the original text, I was able to link Explication to a prominent 12th-century copyist, Gilbert de la Porrée, bishop of Poitiers from 1142-1154. In the end, then, I can make a pretty tenable connection between 375’s Apocalypse and the city of Poitiers.
Locating the Past: Language and Culture in BNF Manuscript 375, Presidents Summer Fellowship
For my President's Summer Fellowship Award, I undertook to pinpoint the geographical origins of a medieval French manuscript and to thereby develop a novel philological method of inquiry that could hold great promise for medievalism, art history, and for my development as an individual and a scholar.