Deguilleville.
Before his death in 1895, Mr. G. N. Currie was preparing an edition of the 15th and 16th century Prose Versions of Guillaume de Deguilleville’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, with the French prose version by Jean Gallopes, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., he having generously promist to pay the extra cost of printing the French text, and engraving one or two of the illuminations in his MS. But Mr. Currie, when on his deathbed, charged a friend to burn all his MSS. which lay in a corner of his room, and unluckily all the E. E. T. S.’s copies of the Deguilleville prose versions were with them, and were burnt with them, so that the Society will be put to the cost of fresh copies, Mr. Currie having died in debt.
Guillaume de Deguilleville, monk of the Cistercian abbey of Chaalis, in the diocese of Senlis, wrote his first verse Pèlerinaige de l’Homme in 1330-1 when he was 36.[1] Twenty-five (or six) years after, in 1355, he revised his poem, and issued a second version of it,[2] a revision of which was printed ab. 1500. Of the prose representative of the first version, 1330-1, a prose Englishing, about 1430 A.D., was edited by Mr. Aldis Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1869, from MS. Ff. 5. 30 in the Cambridge University Library. Other copies of this prose English are in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, Q. 2. 25; Sion College, London; and the Laud Collection in the Bodleian, no. 740.[3] A copy in the Northern dialect is MS. G. 21, in St. John’s Coll., Cambridge, and this is the MS. which will be edited for the E. E. Text Society. The Laud MS. 740 was somewhat condenst and modernised, in the 17th century, into MS. Ff. 6. 30, in the Cambridge University Library:[4] “The Pilgrime or the Pilgrimage of Man in this World,” copied by Will. Baspoole, whose copy “was verbatim written by Walter Parker, 1645, and from thence transcribed by G. G. 1649; and from thence by W. A. 1655.” This last copy may have been read by, or its story reported to, Bunyan, and may have been the groundwork of his Pilgrim’s Progress. It will be edited for the E. E. T. Soc., its text running under the earlier English, as in Mr. Herrtage’s edition of the Gesta Romanorum for the Society. In February 1464,[5] Jean Gallopes—a clerk of Angers, afterwards chaplain to John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France—turned Deguilleville’s first verse Pèlerinaige into a prose Pèlerinage de la vie humaine.[6] By the kindness of Lord Aldenham, as above mentiond, Gallopes’s French text will be printed opposite the early prose northern Englishing in the Society’s edition.
The Second Version of Deguilleville’s Pèlerinaige de l’Homme, A.D. 1355 or -6, was englisht in verse by Lydgate in 1426. Of Lydgate’s poem, the larger part is in the Cotton MS. Vitellius C. xiii (leaves 2-308). This MS. leaves out Chaucer’s englishing of Deguilleville’s ABC or Prayer to the Virgin, of which the successive stanzas start with A, B, C, and run all thro’ the alphabet; and it has 2 main gaps, besides many small ones from the tops of leaves being burnt in the Cotton fire. All these gaps (save the A B C) have been fild up from the Stowe MS. 952 (which old John Stowe completed) and from the end of the other imperfect MS. Cotton, Tiberius A vii. Thanks to the diligence of the old Elizabethan tailor and
manuscript-lover, a complete text of Lydgate’s poem can be given, though that of an inserted theological prose treatise is incomplete. The British Museum French MSS. (Harleian 4399,[7] and Additional 22,937[8] and 25,594[9]) are all of the First Version.
Besides his first Pèlerinaige de l’homme in its two versions, Deguilleville wrote a second, “de l’ame separee du corps,” and a third, “de nostre seigneur Iesus.” Of the second, a prose Englishing of 1413, The Pilgrimage of the Sowle (with poems by Hoccleve, already printed for the Society with that author’s Regement of Princes), exists in the Egerton MS. 615,[10] at Hatfield, Cambridge (Univ. Kk. 1. 7, and Caius), Oxford (Univ. Coll. and Corpus), and in Caxton’s edition of 1483. This version has ‘somewhat of addicions’ as Caxton says, and some shortenings too, as the maker of both, the first translater, tells us in the MSS. Caxton leaves out the earlier englisher’s interesting Epilog in the Egerton MS. This prose englishing of the Sowle will be edited for the Society by Prof. Dr. Leon Kellner after that of the Man is finisht, and will have Gallopes’s French opposite it, from Lord Aldenham’s MS., as his gift to the Society. Of the Pilgrimage of Jesus, no englishing is known.
Anglo-Saxon Psalters.
As to the MS. Anglo-Saxon Psalters, Dr. Hy. Sweet has edited the oldest MS., the Vespasian, in his Oldest English Texts for the Society, and Mr. Harsley has edited the latest, c. 1150, Eadwine’s Canterbury Psalter. The other MSS., except the Paris one, being interlinear versions,—some of the Roman-Latin redaction, and some of the Gallican,—Prof. Logeman has prepared for press, a Parallel-Text edition of the first twelve Psalms, to start the complete work. He will do his best to get the Paris Psalter—tho’ it is not an interlinear one—into this collective edition; but the additional matter, especially in the Verse-Psalms, is very difficult to manage. If the Paris text cannot be parallelised, it will form a separate volume. The Early English Psalters are all independent versions, and will follow separately in due course.
More Money wanted.
Through the good offices of the Examiners, some of the books for the Early-English Examinations of the University of London will be chosen from the Society’s publications, the Committee having undertaken to supply such books to students at a large reduction in price. The net profits from these sales will be applied to the Society’s Reprints.