Medieval French Literature Primary Source Edition PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...precious docuimiKs, he completely wrought into the work we now possess." This work is a historic source of great value, but it is not less precious from a literary point of view. Gamier writes a firm, supple, energetic, and often coloured or pathetic language; he handles Alexandrine verse with a perfect ease, without vain effort, uniting the lines five by five in rhymed strophes; he knows how to express in French grave thoughts and abstract ideas for which it was regarded as scarcely fit. The poem of Jordan Fantosme on the war between Henry II. and, William, king of Scotland (1173-74), almost contemporaneous with that of Gamier, makes a singular contrast with it. Written by a learned clerk even celebrated in the School, eye-witness of the events, it has the form and manner of a song of geste, and if it were not for the author's express claim we might, without hesitation, attribute it to a jongleur. Ambroise, to whom we owe the recital of Richard Coeur de Lion's crusade (1190-92), was very probably a jongleur from the neighbourhood of Evreux; but he uses the ordinary form of chronicles in verse, and sets himself to relate all he has seen with candour; he allots their na'i've and sincere expression to the sentiments of the poor "pilgrims" who, gone to conquer Jerusalem, experienced the cruel deception of only being admitted there for a moment, in trembling, under the contemptuous and insecure watch of the Muslim. This Anglo-French historiography ends by a biography very different from that of Thomas Becket, but as interesting i from other points of view. It is that of an English nobleman, William the Marshal, earl of Pembroke, written shortly after his death (1219), for his children, by a professional poet, who was a native...