Two Manuscripts, One Mind: Charles d'Orléans and the Production of Manuscripts in Two Languages (Paris, BN MS fr. 25458 and London, BLMS Harley 682)

Summary

AS peace negotiations between the English and French intensified in the late 1430s, Charles d'Orleans's hopes must have risen. In the final years of his English captivity (1436–1440), the duke was travelling back and forth between first Surrey, then Wiltshire, and London, where he was working actively to nurture the peace process that would end the Hundred Years War. After more than twenty years in England, he must have sensed that the end of his long ordeal was at hand. One bit of evidence for this is that the duke had two manuscripts made, one in French, one in English, of the poetry he had written over the previous two decades or more. One motive for this copying was surely preservation, his desire to collect in one document material written in a variety of places (individual sheets, bifolia, quires). Another was probably stock taking. The duke was in his mid-forties. He had written a substantial body of verse in two languages. What exactly did it amount to, and how would it look in book form? Some of the shared characteristics of the two manuscripts can speak to us of the duke's personal taste in manuscript layout; their differences testify eloquently to his radically different attitudes toward the two languages in which they are written,to his outlook on his own life at this crucial moment, and to the audience he was envisioning for each.