Table Of ContentThe Châteauroux Version of the «Chanson de Roland»
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für
romanische Philologie
Herausgegeben von Claudia Polzin-Haumann
und Wolfgang Schweickard
Band 384
The Châteauroux
Version of the
«Chanson de Roland»
A Fully Annotated Critical Text
Edited by
Marjorie Moffat
DE GRUYTER
ISBN978-3-11-033961-1
e-ISBN978-3-11-033974-1
ISSN0084-5396
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Preface
The Châteauroux Manuscript
«Ce manuscrit n’a point de valeur appréciable. Aux yeux de certaines personnes il peut
valoircentmillefrancs;auxyeuxd’autrespersonnesvingtsous.»Jean-LouisBourdillon
It is thanks to Antoine-Jean-Louis Bourdillon, a Swiss merchant and banker
but also an ardent bibliophile, that the town of Châteauroux, administrative
centre of the Indre département, has been since 1856 the possessor of the
manuscript copy of the Chanson de Roland cited above, plus other treasures
and the funds necessary for their proper preservation. Bourdillon (1782–1856)
cameofanHuguenotfamilywhohadfledtoGenevainthesixteenthcentury;
a widower and childless, it was perhaps this which led him to bequeath his
valuable collections, his property and his fortune to «Châteauroux, berceau
de ma famille».1
The Châteauroux manuscript contains a single chanson de geste: one of
only four complete texts of the Chanson de Roland in Old French still in exis-
tence and the only complete version to be found today in France. Constantly
overshadowed by the greater literary merit of the Oxford MS (Digby 23) and
lodged in a provincial library, it has not been highly rated. It has been dated
by its gothic script, simple style of illumination and linguistic features to the
late thirteenth century; as such, it reflects contemporary literary and popular
taste,aswellashistoricalevents.Certainspecialfeaturesofthistextalsooffer
a unique insight into the whole process of remaniement.
The place of this MS in the date-sequence of the major versions of the
ChansondeRolandistodaycontroversial,withscholarssuchasSegre,Beretta
and Duggan arguing in favour of the anteriority of the Venice 7 manuscript,
butthemoretraditionaldatingisgiveninthelistbelow.2Alltextsarewritten
FullbiographicaldetailsmaybefoundinChâteaurouxetsesLivres:HistoiredelaBiblio-
thèque,publishedby«LesAmisduVieuxChâteauroux»in2000.Brieferdetailsaregivenby
PaulThibaud(orThibault)inhisintroductoryarticletotheMortiereditionoftheChâteauroux
ms.Bourdillonwasinfactmistaken:hisfamilyoriginatedintheNivernais,butitwasfrom
BourgesthatJehanIIBourdillon,persecutedasaHuguenot,fledin1562toGeneva.Thefamily
historyissetoutinfascinatingdetail(includingtheprestigiousEnglishbranch)byJacques
Bourdillon,intheBulletindelaSociéténivernaisedesLettres,SciencesetArts51(2002),as
thetextofalecturegivenon21March2002.
Thedatingofthems.willbediscussedlaterintheIntroduction;asmaybeseenfromthe
listgivenhere,C,V7andPareofapproximatelythesamedate;V4isslightlylater.
vi CompleteTextsandIncompleteVersions
inlaissesmonorimesbutonlyOisassonancedthroughout.Completetextsand
acephalous versions are listed separately below.
Complete Texts
(i) Thetwelfth-centurymanuscript,Digby23,intheBodleianLibrary,Oxford
(sigmaO):theearliestknown,assonancedversionofthepoem,compris-
ing 4002 lines of verse;
(ii) The Châteauroux manuscript (C), 8201 lines, late thirteenth century;
mainly in rhyme;
(iii) Thelatethirteenth-/veryearlyfourteenth-century3manuscriptintheBib-
liotecaNazionaleMarciana,Venice,Gall.VII,4knownasV7:8880linesin
theDugganedition.V7hassmoothlyrhymedlaissesmonorimeswithvery
rare poetic licence; for the most part it closely resembles C;
(iv) Theearlyfourteenth-century5manuscriptGall.IV(now225)intheBiblio-
teca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, known today as V4: a strongly Italian-
ised version with the first 3846 lines corresponding to O (but with asso-
nance at times converted to somewhat imperfect rhyme), the remaining
2163linesinfullyrhymedlaissesmonorimes,butwithadigressiononthe
«Prise de Narbonne», inserted V4 3848–4417, which is not found in any
other version of the Roland;
Incomplete Versions
(v) Thelatethirteenth-centurymanuscript860intheBibliothèqueNationale
inParis(P):amainlyrhymedversionwithoccasionalassonance,attimes
verysimilartoCandV7,butlackingthefirstquireoftext(line1matches
C 1553, the first line of folio 24 verso in C);
(vi) Thefourteenth-centurymanuscript984intheBibliothèquedelaVillede
Lyon (L): a rhymed version sometimes very close to P, but often in
abridgedform,withanevenlargersectionatthebeginningofthepoem
missing (its first lines correspond approximately to lines 2150 seq. in C);
This date, generally accepted by scholars, is endorsed by D’Arcais in her analysis of V7’s
simpleillumination.Cf.D’Arcais1984foradetaileddiscussionofthestyleofdecorationand
itsimplicationsinregardtodate.
BibliotecaNazionaleMarcianaCod.Fr.2.7(=251).
Cf.IntroductiontoCarloBeretta’s1995editionofV4andthearticleonitsilluminationby
D’Arcais1984,datingV4tobetween1320and1345.TheBibliotecaMarcianareferenceisCod.
Fr.2.4(=225).
IncompleteVersions vii
(vii) The fifteenth-century manuscript R, 3, 32 at Trinity College, Cambridge
(T):arhymedversionwhichalsolacksthefirstpartofthepoem,starting
at C 1093 (the third line of folio 17 verso in C).
In addition, there are a number of fragmentary texts: the Lorraine fragments
(F)of347linesandother180-linefragmentspublishedbyCLavergneinRoma-
niaXXXV445,plustheLondon«BritishMuseum»fragment(B)corresponding
to O 2776–2883 and dating from the end of the thirteenth century, but their
brevity and lacunæ make them rarely useful in the editing of C. Similarly,
several foreign versions – most notably the Middle High German Ruolandsliet
(K) and the eighth branch of the Old Norse Karlamagnussaga (n), which are
based onassonanced Frenchsources – arenot reallyrelevant tothe clarifica-
tionofdifficultreadingsinC,althoughtheytestifytothepan-Europeanpopu-
larity of the Roland story and provide valuable insights into the evolution of
thetextandthedatingofremaniements.ThePseudo-TurpinandtheProvençal
Roncsasvals have proved largely irrelevant.
OftheaboveversionsofLaChansondeRoland,theOxfordtextstandspre-
eminent. It has been recognized as the first great work of French literature,6
outstanding for its nobility of theme, psychological accuracy, effective use of
a limited vocabulary, restraint and balance, a poem in which the desmesure
of Roland is directly comparable to the hubris of the Homeric heroes. During
the last sixty years, new editions of the V4 text, valuable because it contains
theonlyotherassonancedversionofthepoem,havebeenproducedbyGasca
Queirazza (1954), Robertson-Mellor (Salford, 1980) and Beretta (Pavia, 1995);
and Cesare Segre has stressed the importance of V4 and the rhymed versions
in his 1971 edition of the Roland, modified 1989, and in Segre 1974. A great
many aspects of the other versions have been studied over recent years,7 but
there has been no critical, fully annotated edition of the Châteauroux manu-
script.8Thisisstillthesituationtoday,despitethepublicationofalltheRoland
Corpus texts at the end of 2005 (see below).
Inthepresentedition,thefocusonCratherthantheCV7modelhasgiven
rise to an interesting change of perspective on its distinctive characteristics
and thus on its position within any schema of the relationship between the
differentversionsoftheRoland.Thetheoriesandhypothesespropoundedhere
Cf.Bédier1927,inrespectoftheprécellenceofO.
E.g. Rosellini 1960a; 1962, which compares V4 with O and the other versions; Rosellini
1960b;Brook1990andawiderangeofbooksandmonographsbyJosephJ.Duggan,Cesare
Segre,KarlHeinzBender,AnnaleeC.Rejhon,etc.
Horrentcomments:«Personnen’aétudiélesversionsriméesenelles-mêmesetpourelles-
mêmes»(1951,208n.7).
viii EarlierEditionsoftheManuscript
havearisendirectlyfromaclosestudyofthetext;indeed,theconsultationof
other recent editions of the Roland and related (mainly post-1950) research of
all kinds has been driven and guided by questions stemming from this study.
Whilst there have been, therefore, no a priori assumptions deriving from the
more recent studies by eminent researchers in this field, their findings and
conclusionshavebeencarefullyexaminedandweighedagainstwhatmaywell
be a rather naïve argument, but one solidly based on textual evidence.
Earlier Editions of the Manuscript
Theearliest«modern»transcriptionoftheChâteaurouxms.(referredtohence-
forward simply as «C») was made in 1818 by Guyot des Herbiers, whose text
(with corrections added in red ink circa 1870) is lodged in the Bibliothèque
Nationale (mss. fr. 15–108, suppl. fr. 254–21). This text, together with the mss.
from Venice (V4 and V7), Paris (P), Cambridge (T) and Lyon (L), appears to
haveformedthebasisofathesispresentedbyMoninattheSorbonneatsome
timepriorto1840.9In1841,Jean-LouisBourdillonpublishedhisowncomplete
but idiosyncratic edition, Roncisvals mis en lumière, with supplements pub-
lishedin1847,1850and1851.LargeextractsfromCwerequotedbyFrancisque
Michelinhis1869workontheChansondeRoland.In1883,WendelinFoerster
publishedatranscriptionofCwithV7’svariationsfromC’stextprintedbelow
each line or, where there was greater divergence between the two texts, after
therelevantlaisseinC.Finally,RaoulMortierpublishedhislightlyannotated
transcription in 1943 as part of his complete edition of all the manuscripts of
the Chanson de Roland; reference will be made later to the preamble to that
edition, in which Mortier makes perceptive comments on the text and on its
relationshipwith V7and P.Acomprehensive introductionto theMS wassup-
pliedbyPaulThibaud(orThibault),secretarytotheChâteaurouxLibraryCom-
mittee,givingitshistory(insofarasthiswasknownatthetime)andadetailed
palæographic study (composition and quality of parchment, style of script,
punctuation,scribalerrors).ThiswasbasedinpartonalectureonLesManu-
scrits de la Bibliothèque de Châteauroux given on the 16th May 1881 by
M. Joseph Patureau, Membre de la Société de l’Histoire de France, the text of
which is preserved in the archives of the library.
Towardstheendof2005,anewcriticaleditionofalltheOldFrenchmanu-
scriptsoftheRolandwaspublishedunderthetitleLaChansondeRoland:The
French Corpus by a consortium of scholars under the general editorship of
CitedintheThibaudintroductiontoMortier’seditionof1940–1944,referredtobelow.
TheCurrentEdition ix
JosephJ.DugganoftheUniversityofCalifornia.Eachscholarwasresponsible
foraparticularmanuscript:IanShortforO,RobertF.CookforV4,AnnaleeC.
Rejhon for P, the late Wolfgang van Emden for T, William W. Kibler for L and
thefragments.ProfessorDugganwashimselfresponsiblefortheeditionofthe
Châteauroux-Venice 7 version, producing a fully annotated Critical Text based
onV7withtheaimofprovidingatextapproximatingtothecommonancestor
ofChâteauroux-Venice7;hethereforeincludedanunemended,non-annotated
transcription of the Châteauroux manuscript on pages 529–807, as Appendix
B.Nofullyannotated,criticaleditionoftheChâteaurouxmanuscripthasbeen
published at the moment of writing.
In the present edition, due note has been taken of the Duggan edition,
particularlywhereopposingviewsaretakenregardingthepresenceofclusters
ofassonancedlaissesinCandthereasonsfortheassociatedrepetitions.Iam
indebted to Professor Duggan for drawing my attention to Beretta’s Studio sui
rapporti fra i manoscritti rimati della «Chanson de Roland» (Beretta 2001); but
communication between us has been limited and confined to the period
Autumn 2005–Spring 2006.
The Current Edition
The current edition has been based on the original manuscript, originally
using the microfilm in the Archives Nationales in Paris but later verified by
close examination of the manuscript in Châteauroux, and checked against
both the Foerster and the Mortier editions. Both Foerster’s transcription of V7
and Mortier’s photographic reproductions of V7’s complete text have proved
invaluablesourcesofalternativereadings,whenemendingscribalerrorsinC.
For comparisons with the Digby 23 MS (sigma O), Whitehead’s edition has
been used; indeed, the initial work on C for this edition was done under
Dr Whitehead’s direction in 1951–1952 and influenced by his advice and com-
mentsin1953.InrespectofV4,Mortier’seditionwasoriginallyused,butthis
has been tempered by reference to Carlo Beretta’s recent edition. Mortier’s
editionoftheotherrhymedversionshasbeenthesourceofallotherreadings
andcomparisons,buttheV7readingshavebeencheckedagainsttheDuggan
editionandthe DugganV7line-numbersusedforease ofidentification(since
no other line-numbers exist).
Foravarietyofreasonsnoworkwasdoneonthecurrenteditionbetween
August 1953 and March 1998. Since then, the facilities available on computer
have been fully utilized, as have also those of the British Library in London.
This has been very much a piece of private and independent research; any
errorsaresolelymine.However,IshouldliketorecordmythankstoProfessor
x TheCurrentEdition
Bogdanowforherencouragementandadvicein1998,toProfessorMirjamFoot
for very useful information about manuscripts, to Dr Michelle Brown for her
comments onthe marginaldecoration inthe ms.,to Mme.Dominique Potard,
Conservateur en chef de la Médiathèque Equinoxe de Châteauroux for her
enthusiastic co-operation and to her and her colleagues for their generous
assistance,tothelibrariansoftheBibliotecaNazionaleMarcianainVenicefor
being so accommodating and helpful, with special thanks to Dottoressa Suzy
MarconfordrawingmyattentiontohercontributiontoDr.CarlosAlvar’sedi-
tion of La Entrada en España (2003). Her comments on my photographs of
the Châteauroux decoration were particularly valuable. So too were those of
ProfessorM.Canova,whokindlydiscussedthemwithmeatveryshortnotice,
when I was in Padua. Professor Lorenzo Renzi also generously accorded me
time to discuss my work. In both Padua and Mantua, librarians were unfail-
inglyhelpfulandsotoo,inParis,werethestaffattheBibliothèqueNationale,
the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne; nearer
home, the librarians of All Souls’, Balliol, Corpus Christi, Keble, Magdalen,
MertonandNewCollege,OxfordandTrinityCollege,Cambridge,accordedme
generousaccesstoearlymanuscripts,andthoseoftheBodleianandTaylorian
Librariesofferedvaluableassistanceinfindinglaterreferencebooks.Ishould
also like to record my special thanks to the late dottoressa Ada di Nola, for
her lively interest and practical help.
To this list I must, most importantly, append Professor Philip Bennett of
Edinburgh University, whom I first contacted in 2008. He has patiently read
through all sections of this edition; and his comments on my Introduction
have enabled me to revise and restructure my reasoning so as to produce
greater clarity in my argument against the Segre theories.
Mostofall,thisworkisdedicatedtomylatehusband,EdwinJohnMoffat,
forhisconstantencouragementand,despiteallhishealthproblems,theprac-
tical assistance with everyday tasks which enabled me to devote time to this
study.
Marjorie Moffat
Tonbridge, 11 August 2012
