Anna S. Larsen and Dr. Jesse Hurlbut, Department of French and Italian

Between the years of 1355 and 1358, Guillaume de Digulleville, a Cistercian monk from Châlis, wrote Le pèlerinage de l’âme, the second poem in a trilogy of allegorical pilgrimages. This poem, along with its predecessor Le pèlerinage de la vie humaine and its successor Le pèlerinage de Jhesu Christ proved to be one of the most popular literary works of the 14th and 15th centuries. Seventy-five known manuscripts exist which contain one or more poems from the trilogy, demonstrating that they circulated through England, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and France. The trilogy was translated into English, Castilian, German, Italian, Dutch and Latin. Le pèlerinage de l’âme is rare in its explicit, extended, and detailed description of Purgatory, a realm which was not much represented in medieval texts even after the Second Lateran Council.

Digulleville’s poems capitalize on the popularity enjoyed by the dream vision motif, rendered wildly successful by the Roman de la rose. Indeed, the introduction to the Pylgremage of the Lyfe of the Manhod, the English version of the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine, explicitly states that the poem is written in the style of the Roman de la Rose, though, in contrast with Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s text, this particular poem is concerned with matters of doctrine as opposed to concerns of the heart. Digulleville also made much use of traditional dream-vision literature both secular and religious, as well as such popular medieval texts as the Psychomachia, Boethius’ Consolatio, lyrics, and sermons. It was the Pèlerinages’ typicality that made them so popular. The Pèlerinage de l’âme and its English counterpart, in particular, synthesized previous depictions and explanations of Purgatory so well in both text and illustrative scheme that it became the primary source for following representations of Purgatory. The reader recognizes “large ancient image-complexes, surprising him in new contexts and opening the view upon conceptions and subtleties which they were accustomed to shadow forth. This kind of recognition is especially important” and helps explain why the trilogy was so easily accessible to a broad societal and cultural audience. The Pèlerinage de l’âme, along with its companion texts, is marked by an allegorical and religious orthodoxy which not only pleased a comparatively theologically stable French culture, but also was especially enticing to an English interpreter who saw in the text an opportunity to enter the fray of contemporary English theological debate and defend the Church and traditional society from those who would destroy the fabric of the English state.

The purpose of my project was to photograph a manuscript of the Pèlerinage de l’âme in order to make the complete text, consisting both of word and image, available to the public. During July 2005, I traveled to France with my mentor, Dr. Hurlbut, and we traveled to Arras to photograph a manuscript of the poem which is located in the municipal library. I am currently working on a complete transcription of the manuscript version of the poem so that ultimately an edition of this particular manuscript might be published digitally. After photographing the manuscript, I presented a paper on the nature of its allegorical and interpretive program at an international congress held in Angers, The Anagogical Image and the Moralized Text. The title of my paper was “The Pilgrimage of a Text,” and considered relationships between the French and the English versions of Digulleville’s poem. This research has led me to further projects on the poem, including a study of its conception of purgatory as based on Alcher of Clairvaux’s theology of the soul, and another conference paper to be presented at this coming spring, entitled “Transforming the Self: journeying through purgatory in the Pylgremage of the Sowle.” While my original ORCA project has been completed, the experience has led to a host of other research opportunities which comprise the focus of my graduate career.

References

• Edmond Faral, Guillaume de Digulleville: moine de Châalis (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1952), 2. See Faral for an extended discussion of Digulleville’s life and times, along with a detailed explication of his trilogy.
• See J. J. Stürzinger, Le pèlerinage de l’âme, Roxburghe Club 127 (London : J.B. Nicholas, 1895) for a list of seventy-three of the manuscripts. Faral adds two more (Faral 11, footnote 1).
• See Rosemarie Potz McGerr, ed., The Pilgrimage of the Soul: A Critical Edition of the Middle English Dream Vision Vol I. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990), cviii-cix for bibliographic references concerning these linguistic and manuscript traditions.
• For more on the representation of Purgatory, or lack of it, see Takami Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry (Cambridge: D. W. Brewer, 1997). Also very good is Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (London: British Museum Press, 1996), particularly the last chapter, “Death and the Afterlife,” pp. 164-214.
• McGerr, xxix. Also see Faral for extensive discussion of sources, particularly purgatorial visions, along with Matsuda (pp. 60-2, 67, 76, 93-4, 101, 108, 153) and Binski (133, 160).
• Ibid., xxx.
• “[The Pèlerinage de l’âme] was extremely popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and became a source for some of the English texts on Purgatory…In England, it was translated independently into English prose…and was circulated widely in both English adaptations and the French original…The Middle English Pilgrimage of the Soul is the chief vehicle for descriptions of Purgatory in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, along with the translations of the twelfth-century Latin visions.” Matsuda, 60.
• Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966), 164.
• This particular idea of the role of The Pylgremage of the Sowle will be discussed later in the paper.