Translation, Canons, and Cultural Capital: Manuscripts and Reception of Charles d'Orléans English Poetry

Summary

IN the autumn of 1415, in the bloody aftermath of Agincourt field, Charles, duc d'Orleans, was pulled from beneath a heap of bodies and armor into a twenty-five-year English captivity. The historical import of this fact is consider-able: this Prince of the house of Valois, later to become father of Louis XII and uncle of François I, would figure largely in the settlements ending the Hundred Years' War. However, the literary results of Charles's long imprisonment have not been much studied, given their significance and interest. Captive in several prominent English households, Charles composed more than 13,000 lines of verse in both French and English, in carefully constructed lyric sequences that are broadly (but not entirely) parallel in content. The English side of the parallel ceuvre, found in BL MS Harley 682, is in fact the first one-author love-lyric sequence in English. Not only is it the first, it is remarkable for reasons both theoretical and literary-historical. The bilingual cuvre appears at a crucial moment, that of final separation between two nations that had been as one since 1066 and between which powerful connections and tensions persist even today. Yet given its significance and size, Charles's work has gone relatively uncanonized in English literary history. In an effort to understand better the factors at work in this instance of marginalization (and thus better to understand the workings of literary canons), the essay sketches a comparative rezeptiongeschichte.