6 - Denis Piramus's La Vie Seint Edmund: Translating Cultural Identities in the Anglo-Norman World

Summary

After the Norman Conquest of England, there was a remarkable output of hagiographic activity dedicated to the saints of the Anglo-Saxon past. While most lives of English saints were re-written in Latin, French (Anglo-Norman) also became a prominent language in both the production of hagiographies and everyday life. The two vernaculars of post-Conquest England, English, the language of the conquered, and French, the language of the conquerors, ‘enriched’ one another. In addition to written Latin, the use of vernacular English writing in various genres, for example, would become the impetus for the adoption of written French literature by the early twelfth century, and its use in record-keeping in later centuries. As the ruling class of England began to identify itself as English, French continued to be spoken and utilised well into the fourteenth century, refuting oversimplified assumptions that monolingualism correlates to the identity of people. After 1066, French had become part of the developing cultural identity of the people of England. Its continued usage at the English court and in business records points to a more complex understanding about the role language played in shaping medieval identities.

Composed around 1190 by Denis Piramus and commissioned by Piramus’s superiors at Bury St Edmunds, Le Vie Seint Edmund le Rei (hereafter LVSE) stands as an example of Anglo-Norman hagiographic production of this period offering a unique treatment of the legend of the early medieval King Edmund (d. c. 870) as well as a compelling look into the construction of identities in relation to language. The text was written in octosyllabic couplets and offered not only an account of the saint's life and martyrdom but also an unusually comprehensive chronological narrative of Britain's history from the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons on the island to the era of the Danish Conquest. This literary motif of Anglo-Saxon settlement is widespread in both English histories and hagiographies of the time, but it is one that Piramus greatly alters in LVSE. Book I recounts the history of Anglo-Saxon settlements in Britain, Edmund's childhood, his rise to the throne of East Anglia, and his martyrdom at the hands of Danish invaders. Book II continues the history of Danish conquests in England and the saint's posthumous miracles. Piramus drew the contents from a variety of sources, including pre-Conquest and contemporary hagiographies, miracle collections, and chronicles, as well as historiographic prose works of British origin.