On the Text Editions
We present two longer text editions in this volume. Both are single text editions, in other words, they are editions created from one manuscript. In the case of the Account-Inventory, the edition and translation below are based on the one surviving text made of five rolls of parchment now in the Archives nationales de France (Paris, AN, series J 821, no. 1, Rolls A–D). In the case of the seven poems attributed to the poet Rutebeuf, we have generated our edition and translation using one manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, BnF, MS fr. 1635). Michel Zink’s edition and modern French translation of the complete works of Rutebeuf follows that of Bastin and Faral’s edition and was generated from twenty known manuscripts that contained Rutebeuf’s poems.2 It should be noted that there is no single “complete” medieval manuscript containing all of the poems attributed to Rutebeuf, and that both Zink’s and Bastin and Faral’s “complete editions” are in effect modern gatherings of the poet’s works. In 1946, Bastin and Faral produced a shorter collection of Rutebeuf’s eleven crusade poems. For that edition they drew from four extant manuscripts.3 For this and other reasons we have chosen to base the present edition and translation on one manuscript, BnF, MS fr. 1635, which was produced in the late thirteenth century and is the most complete gathering of the poems.4 It contains fifty-one of the fifty-six poems attributed to Rutebeuf, and contains all eleven of the poems on the crusades. BnF, MS fr. 1635 was most likely created in eastern Champagne, Burgundy, or southern Lorraine, therefore in the region that shares a dialect of French similar to the French that Eudes and those in his retinue would have known and used. In choosing to produce a single-text edition, we have given priority to this collection and its use as one recension of these poems, rather than attempt to generate a new version of the text by comparing and amalgamating multiple manuscript variants. Our edition is therefore somewhat distinct from those of Bastin and Faral and of Zink. In all cases, however, we have consulted both modern editions as we worked.
2. Zink, Rutebeuf, 37–45.
3. Bastin and Faral, Onze poèmes, 3–4.
4. The manuscript has been digitized and is available on Gallica, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b9058335d.