The Distaff Gospels: A First Modern English Edition of Les Évangiles des Quenouilles

326 Pages·2006·2.14 MB·English

by  Madeleine Jeay, Madeleine Jeay, Kathleen Garay, Kathleen Garay

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THE DISTAFF GOSPELS
A First Modern English Edition of
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
broadview editions
series editor: L.W. Conolly
THEDISTAFFGOSPELS 1
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Title page from The Gospelles of Dystaves(London:Wynkyn de
Worde,ca.1510) Published by permission of the Huntington
Library,San Marino,California,USA.Rare book number
13067.
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THE DISTAFF GOSPELS
A First Modern English Edition of
Les Évangiles des Quenouilles
translated by Thomas K.Abbott
with revisions by Lara Denis
translated and edited by
Madeleine Jeay and Kathleen Garay
broadview editions
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©2006 Madeleine Jeay and Kathleen Garay
All rights reserved.The use of any part of this publication reproduced,transmitted in any form
or by any means,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,recording,or otherwise,or stored in a
retrieval system,without prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopy-
ing,a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency),One Yonge
Street,Suite 1900,Toronto,Ontario M5E 1E5—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
The distaff gospels :a first modern English edition of Les évangiles des quenouilles /
translated and edited by Madeleine Jeay and Kathleen Garay.
Translation of Les évangiles des quenouilles,attributed to Fouquart de Cambray,Antoine
Duval and Jean d’Arras.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55111-560-3
1. Folklore—France. 2. Superstition—France. I. Jeay,Madeleine
II. Garay,Kathleen E.,1945- III. Fouquart,de Cambray IV. Duval,Antoine
V. Jean,d’Arras,14e s VI. Title:Évangiles des quenouilles.
PQ1600.A1E8213 2006 848′.202 C2006-900236-3
Broadview Editions
The Broadview Editions series represents the ever-changing canon of literature in English
by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable lesser-known works.
Advisory editor for this volume:Jennie Rubio
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Contents
Acknowledgements (cid:127) 7
Introduction (cid:127) 9
A Note on the Text (cid:127) 61
Illustrations (cid:127) 62
The Distaff Gospels(Paris Manuscript:BnF 2151) (cid:127) 64
The Distaff Gospels(Chantilly Manuscript:Musée Condé) (cid:127) 196
The Distaff Gospels:Translations of the Spinsters’Names (cid:127) 261
Appendix A:From Giovanni Boccaccio,The Decameron
(ca.1351) (cid:127) 265
Appendix B:From Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung,The
Romance of the Rose(late 13th century) (cid:127) 277
Appendix C:From The Fifteen Joys of Marriage(anon.,early 15th
century) (cid:127) 281
Appendix D:From François Villon,Testament(mid 15th
century) (cid:127) 287
Appendix E:From Christine de Pizan,Ballad 26and The Book of
the Three Virtues(early 15th century) (cid:127) 291
Appendix F:From Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Bartholomew
the Englishman),On the Properties of Things(mid 13th
century) (cid:127) 295
Select Bibliography (cid:127) 305
Index (cid:127) 317
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Acknowledgements
This book,several years in gestation,has been a source of great
pleasure for us both. For Madeleine Jeay it has meant a return,
with fresh eyes and insights, to a text which she came to know
intimately as she prepared a French edition of Les Évangiles des
Quenouilles for her doctoral thesis (in 1980) and subsequently for
its publication (1985).For Kathy Garay it has been a time of dis-
covery,not only of this fascinating and important text,but of the
rich folkloric context of the late medieval period. Madeleine
would like to express her gratitude to her mother and grand-
mothers for their wisdom and knowledge of traditional rural
culture: this book is her tribute to that precious heritage. Kathy
hopes that her daughters will find their Hungarian and Irish rural
roots reflected in this book of women’s wisdom;she thanks them
and her husband Nick for their continuing support and under-
standing.The editors are blessed with a friendship that is a con-
tinuing source of inspiration.
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Introduction
Part I: The Literary Context and Textual History of
The Distaff Gospels
... in order to amuse myself and to pass the time during the
long evenings between last Christmas and Candlemas,I went
to the house of one of my neighbours, an old lady, where I
often went to chat with several women of the neighbourhood
who met there to spin and to exchange lively conversation.1
Thus our unidentified male author frames the collection of fif-
teenth-century folk beliefs, which make up The Distaff Gospels.
The fictional “learned cleric,” acting as the text’s narrator,2 has
been persuaded to function as a scribe, whose task is to record
the “gospels”of these female evangelists,the stories and lessons
which they have hitherto shared orally,so that they might be pre-
served and disseminated to the women of the future.The setting
is the long winter veillées: a time when neighbours would often
gather to share their stories and gossip, while occupying them-
selves with some handwork. One common task carried out by
women was the winding of thread onto their distaffs.
The women whose wisdom provides the content of these
gospels claim that the knowledge they intend to pass on comes
from ancient antiquity,from Hermofrodita,the wife of the great
magician king Zoroaster.This invention is based on the bisexual
Hermaphroditus who for a time looked like woman, discovered
the secrets of women,and revealed the gynaecological knowledge
he learned from them.3The narrator of The Distaff Gospels can be
considered as a second Hermaphroditus; like him, he plans to
disclose and publicize the secrets of the old women of his neigh-
1 Paris,prologue,p.73 below.
2 Only the main text from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France,Paris,
has the narrator figure framing the structure of the gospels.
3 This anecdote about the figure of Hermaphroditus is borrowed from a
fourtheenth-century encyclopaedia,Placides et Timeo ou li secrés as
philosophes,ed.Claude A.Thomasset (Geneva:Droz,1980) 134–36.The
origin of his bisexual nature is explained in the context of fourteenth-
and fifteenth-century retellings of Ovid’s Metamorphosis,the Ovide
moraliséand Ovide moralisé en prose,ed.C.de Boer (Amsterdam:North-
Holland,1954) 144–46.
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bourhood,the repertoire of their traditional beliefs,recipes,and
prognostications. As in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales,the content here is organized into a number of
days during which stories are told, framed by a narrative which
explains the reasons for their meeting and presents the “chairs”
of each session.1 Our women have decided to meet on the six
working days of the week in order to transmit the fruits of their
experience.
The result is an exceptional collection of almost 250 popular
beliefs, describing the daily lives of peasants at the end of the
Middle Ages, specifically from Flanders and Picardy, the region
in which the text originated.They are primarily concerned with
female preoccupations, reflecting women’s responsibility for the
survival and prosperity of the household.Beliefs described touch
on many topics of interest to women:marriage and children;the
often-difficult relationships between husbands and wives;and the
health and well-being of people and animals.To provide some
wider context for this first modern English translation of the text,
we will consider its value as a repository of fifteenth-century folk-
lore.We will explore the text from literary,historical,and cultural
standpoints:we consider its use of irony and its antifeminism (as
well as the links between these two aspects);its connections with
the genre of short story collections;its origins,dissemination,and
readership;and finally,its cultural context.In addition to the Old
French originals of our two central Distaff Gospel manuscripts,
we also provide translated excerpts from several contemporary
texts which have either structural or thematic aspects in common
with it.
TheDistaff Gospels as Folklore
A key issue concerning the practices and superstitions collected
within The Distaff Gospels’ narrative frame—the gatherings of a
group of peasant women—is the question of their authenticity.
Given the ironic treatment of the material,we might reasonably
suspect these popular beliefs to be themselves parodic,and hence
of little ethnographic value. The verification of their accuracy
raises serious methodological issues. Checking the existence of
1 On frame tales,see Carl Lindhal,John McNamara,and John Lindow,
Medieval Folklore:An Encyclopedia of Myths,Legends,Tales,Beliefs,and
Customs,2 vols.(Santa Barbara,Denver,Oxford:ABC Clio,2000) 1:
377–79 and 228–32 on the folkloric traditions in the Decameron.
10 INTRODUCTION