Prose in Translation. Monastic translations in north-eastern France: a textual community at the origins of French prose – PROSIT

In the literary history of the French Middle Ages, the 12th century can be seen as the century of verse, whereas the 13th is the century of prose, bearing witness to the emergence of great historiographical compilations and the first cycles of romances. Before these texts, there are only a few rare traces of prose as a form of writing, making it difficult to ascertain the context and environment in which they were produced. The translations produced in the north-eastern part of the langue d’oïl-speaking domain in the second half of the 12th century stand out as unique within this panorama. The group of texts is coherent on several levels: from the choice of works translated (patristic texts, parenetic works on monastic life, and homiletics, with Gregory the Great and Bernard of Clairvaux in a pre-eminent position) to their language and style. These ‘monastic’ translations, which have remained almost completely neglected by scholarship and are still partly unpublished or accessible only in editions from the late 19th century, can be seen as the first “workshop” that enabled a Romance language to raise its prose to an unprecedented stylistic level. They are also singular in that they are preserved in manuscripts copied in the same environments in which the translations were composed, between the end of the 12th and the very beginning of the 13th century. These are texts that were composed, copied and read within a micro-community, or several micro-communities networked by close links, and which help define these communities as such. Their posterity, as well as their role in the development of the language of preaching and prose narration, remains entirely unknown. The PROSIT project aims to address this complex system of text development, circulation, transformation and reception, while highlighting the unparalleled opportunity for study that these translations represent for a Romance language of this period.