Primary Sources

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Primary Sources

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1mansfieldhistory
Editado: Ago 1, 2007, 9:57 am

taking my que from the post Top Five FOundation Books for Medieval Studies by Prehensel, I'm wondering what are your favourite primary sources from the medieval era? Beowulf was metioned as well as Morte De Arthur. Any other must reads?

2SJaneDoe
Ago 1, 2007, 11:10 am

Well, obviously The Canterbury Tales. I'd also pick some Old English works besides Beowulf, like The Dream of the Rood or The Battle of Maldon. Also The Book of the City of the Ladies, and The Chronicles of the Crusades. I also really enjoyed The Goodman of Paris/Le Ménagier de Paris and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, but I don't know if they're necessarily essential.

3A_musing
Ago 1, 2007, 11:30 am

Well, unfortunately only in translation, but for literary works how about the Sagas and the Niebelungenlied? The Sagas especially give some interesting flavor to the process by which Christendom expanded to German and Nordic cultures.

4margad
Ago 4, 2007, 6:24 pm

Is there a good English translation of the Nibelungenlied out there? The ones I've seen were stultifyingly boring, which is not true of the original.

5A_musing
Editado: Ago 5, 2007, 9:25 am

There is a new one by Burton Raffel. I thought it was well done (but haven't and can't read the original, so I can't make that particular comparison).

6margad
Ago 7, 2007, 1:21 am

Thanks, A_musing. I will have to check out Burton Raffel's translation. I'm delighted to learn that a new translation is out. I disliked the old ones not so much because they were unfaithful to the meaning of the original (some minor divergences are inevitable and completely forgiveable if the essence of the work is retained), but because in one case it read like doggerel and in the other because the prose was leaden.

7mansfieldhistory
Ago 9, 2007, 9:51 am

thanks for all your help :) I was looking at the course requirements for my medieval history course and I have to do two essays on primary sources so I thought I would get a head start on reading them.

8Beauregard
Sep 18, 2007, 6:30 pm

Hi Mansfieldhistory!By now you doubtless have done your reading, but I would suggest some selections from Bede's History Marjorie Kempe, and Piers Plowman or the mystery plays, just to add a bit of religious dimension.
Cheers! Beauregard

9mansfieldhistory
Sep 18, 2007, 6:51 pm

Thanks Beauregard.

I'd also like to add The Two Lives of Charlemange to the list. I'm currently working on a paper and loved it.

10OwenGriffiths Primer Mensaje
Nov 11, 2007, 5:48 pm

I'd definitely recommend Bede, The Ecclesiastical History, depending on what you wanted you might like to look to 1:22, 23, 25-27, 2:20-3:1, 4:17-18, 22.

Of course the work is a whole, with a definite story to tell. It can't be fully appreciated unless the whole thing is read, with a real eye to the greater story that Bede is trying to tell.

11ThePam
Nov 12, 2007, 4:06 pm

Hello, newbie here :

Agree with Bede, and would add Gregory of Tour's History of the Franks, and Snorre Sturlason's Heimskringla.

Great sources and good reads.

12medievalmama
Mar 13, 2008, 6:16 pm

The HELIAND although the Old Saxon is better than Murphy's translation which romanticizes it a bit more than I like. The Saxon gospels they are but with wonderful add-ons like the two sentence Matt. 27:19 turned into a whole waking dream/vision sequence with Satan talking to Pilate's wife from under a magical dream helmet!

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight along with Pearl, Patience and Cleanness although I prefer the J. J. Anderson translation to the Cawley one that the touchstones grabbed OR the Tolkein one that pairs SGGK with Sir Orfeo

Marie de France Lais and Chretien de Troyes or if you are into the Parsival/Parsifal/Parzival Grail stories, the collected works of Wolfram von Eschenbach or Hartman von Aue.

13cuffindell
Mar 13, 2008, 7:05 pm

Two of my favorite primary sources for the 12th and 13th centuries are Journey Through Wales and the Description of Wales and The Chronicles of Matthew Paris.

14LostMuse
Mar 19, 2008, 4:33 pm

The Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes are an absolute must. Dante Alighieri's epic trilogy including Inferno is another vital piece of this era's literary history.

15liamfoley
Editado: Mar 19, 2008, 4:52 pm

The history and Topography of Ireland by Gerald of Wales, Summa Theologica by Aquinas (along with his other writings Summa Contra Gentiles & St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics (Norton Critical Editions), Life of St.Columba by Adomnan for starters. Imitation of Christ by Thomas Kempis, The Age of Bede, The Divine Comedy. The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Many of these are available in Penguin editions.

16naprous
Mar 21, 2008, 8:24 pm

The Rule of Saint Benedict
Einhard's Life of Charlemagne
Rosemary Horrox, ed., The Black Death (a collection of sources)
Francis of Assisi -- the vitae by Thomas of Celano, and his own writings
Salimbene

17MMcM
Mar 22, 2008, 10:12 pm

How about best-selling travel literature? Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, Friar Odoric, Rabbi Benjamin, Ibn Battuta?

19ThePam
Editado: Mar 24, 2008, 2:07 pm

Just ran across this book. Final verdict isn't in, but so far it's marvelous.

"Mission to Asia" by Christopher Dawson

Contains narratives, letters, and the sorts from missionaries sent to Mongolia/Khans.

John of Plano Carpini
William of Rubruck ...

with a introduction by Dawson to East/West relationships circa 1200 to 1400.

(dang, don't know why touchstones not touching)

20agorelik
Mar 27, 2008, 12:32 pm



You will need Latin to read the following (small portions have been translated, but the entire book's last translation into English was done in the 15th century) but one of the most unfortunately forgotten books of the Middle Ages is Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum (the Rule of Princes), which was the handbook for political science of the era (many princes, as well as most prominent universities and schools, had copies). Hundreds of copies survive to this day, testifying to the work's great popularity and apparent usefullness.

21erilarlo
Sep 18, 2008, 3:13 pm

Primary sources? Beowulf(the original), das Nibelungenlied, the Elder Edda, assorted sagas and other things in Old Norse, the Manesse manuscript and other Middle High German poetry and courtly epics like Parzival. Bede would be a good addition. The Canterbury Tales and, yes, Morte de Arthur. Of course, when you're talking about primary sources, what has survived best has been fiction or heavily slanted(written to glorify a patron or some saint, etc.), so "histories" have to be taken with many grains of salt(such as Bede's Caedmon story).

22erilarlo
Sep 18, 2008, 3:20 pm

Margad, there actually is a pretty good translation of the Nibelungenlied available in a paperback. It was used in a "medieval German lit in translation" course I was TAing for.(I got to grade all the papers they wrote, which several years of teaching high school English probably made easier than it could have been.) The prof was the same one I'd had for my graduate level course in the original NL, so he was unlikely to have picked a bad translation. All I can dredge up from my memory at the moment(30+ years later), however, is the last name Hatto.

23erilarlo
Sep 18, 2008, 3:23 pm

#12 medievalmamma: A romanticized Heliand? What an odd thought!

24Nicole_VanK
Sep 18, 2008, 7:28 pm

Many of my favourites are already mentioned above. I would like to add the Gesta Danorum = History of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus and, as an art historian I love On Divers Arts by Theophilus Presbyter

25cemanuel
Sep 18, 2008, 10:31 pm

The Song of Roland - A work from when the concept of Chivalry was just getting started.
The History of the Albigensian Crusade by Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay - Obviously slanted in favor of de Montfort but a better read than a lot of primary sources
Handbook for William by Dhuoda - Very different type of source - a Carolingian woman giving her son advice in a very uncertain time.
Paul the Deacon's History of the Lombards
Einhard's Life of Charlemagne
Sidonbius Apollinaris - Whether you consider this Medieval or not will depend on how you date things be he provides a fascinating glimpse of the situation in Gaul as the Empire crumbled
A bunch of the Saints' Lives interest me. It's interesting how the social conventions of the time basically favored the authors making up stories.
And of course The Alexiad by Anna Comnena

26ThePam
Editado: Sep 23, 2008, 5:07 pm

Great additions Cemanuel, to which I would add the chronicles of Fredegar which is essentially a continuation of Gregory of Tours history.

27janeajones
Editado: Sep 23, 2008, 7:19 pm

Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach which I think is one of the best of the Arthurian romances along with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The Tain, a marvellous Irish saga and The Mabinogion, Welsh versions of Arthurian and other tales.

Among all the British lit. including Chaucer and Malory, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain is key.

Christine de Pisan's City of Ladies and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, against which she railed in the querelle des femmes.

28ElenaGwynne
Oct 6, 2008, 2:32 am

If you don't mind a newbie popping in, I'd add the Tolkien and Sisam book on Middle-English. The first half of the book is medieval prose, and the second is a glossary of Middle-English.

I'd give more detail (like the exact title or ISBN), but I haven't seen my copy of the book in a while. I think it's at the back of a double-shelved shelf.

29Nicole_VanK
Oct 6, 2008, 12:01 pm

Would that be : http://www.librarything.com/work/2096090 ? Looks interesting.

30ElenaGwynne
Oct 6, 2008, 12:07 pm

Yes. Tolkien and Kenneth Sisam's book.

31medievalmama
Oct 6, 2008, 8:24 pm

erilario -- perhaps "romanticized" is not the correct word for what Murphy does to the _Heliand_ in his translation of it, but when I translated it, I sometimes wondered if we had read the same book. Because the _Heliand_ is a harmonization of the gospels, literal translation is less readable perhaps, but I still think Murphy took liberties with the text that were acceptable when he translated it but are no longer considered academic translation today -- perhaps calling it an interpretation rather than a strict translation would be more accurate than calling it romanticized.

32erilarlo
Oct 6, 2008, 8:45 pm

I know what you mean by "interpretation", medievalmama. It's done a lot, and I think that's a good word for it. A problem with translation is always trying to decide what aspects of the original you want to preserve in a translation, because you just can't preserve all of them. If you want every shred of meaning, form is going to suffer and vice versa. I've done my own translations of a couple middle high German poems because I wanted to get all those shreds of meaning through, which naturally destroyed the poetry completely. My translations are not singable. I've found singable translations of a couple favorites, but I just can't sing them with the proper expression, or at least not as well, because _I_ know they're not saying the same things.

33medievalmama
Oct 6, 2008, 8:58 pm

erilalo -- thanks for your quick response. I agree with you. My main problem with Murphy is that I feel his choice of wording rewrites not only the text but the theology -- since the _Heliand_ and the Old English translations are what I'm writing my dissertation on, I guess I'm overly picky for a generalist board.

34erilarlo
Oct 6, 2008, 9:10 pm

Where else can we picky types hang out? 8-) I've only battled with the _Heliand_ in the original, not a translation, in the process of writing a paper that was actually on _Muspilli_(I was playing with oral formulaic analysis and metrics), but I've dealt with translations of things from ON that I've read, at least in part, in the original, to say nothing of Middle High German, and I know how tricky translations are.

35medievalmama
Oct 6, 2008, 9:18 pm

I've only read the Niebelungenleid, the Icelandic sagas, and the Poetic Edda in translation -- my very odd triple specialty before I got to dissertation stage was _beowulf_, _Sir gawain and the green knight_, and a double on Shakespeare -- _The Tempest_ and _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. My undergraduate was contrasting _Beowulf_ and the 12th-15thc French and middle English Arthurian lit. Sorry about all the glitches in my type -- this computer is really fighting me tonight and I'm giving up. It has its own mind about capitalization, apostrophes, and spacing.

36reginaromsey
Oct 6, 2008, 11:55 pm

There is actually a translation from 1899 available on Bookfinder.com (evil place) for a mere $65 plus shipping. It says:

Li Livres du Gouvernement des Rois; a XIIIth century French version of Egidio Colonna's treatise De regimine principum, now first published from the Kerr Ms. Together with an introduction and notes and full-page facsimile by Samuel Paul Molenaer
by Giles, of Rome, Archbishop of Bourges, ca. 1243-1316 .

I'm NOT the seller but I do have a real weakness for books like these. Has anyone checked to see if Google Books might have scanned it in? I've found any number of the old facsimile books for the downloading there. Pity Micro Soft got scared away but I'm glad I actually did download several volumes to my hard disk before they curled up in front of the Mouse that Snarled.

37erilarlo
Oct 7, 2008, 9:42 pm

HI, medievalmamma 8-) I've read some of those in the original. You'd enjoy my Beowulf: I triple-spaced typed a copy and did an interlinear notes translation, but I did have a prose translation I resorted to at times to make sure I hadn't wandered off track. I was told I was insane for doing it for only one semester credit of independent study, but that's all I needed at the time. Needless to say, my advisor/teacher didn't expect me to do any MORE than that. 8-) I've only read two whole sagas in ON, but parts of some others in Gordon. Sagas are so much easier to read in English, though 8-) NL was in MHG, of course. "Of course" because my main languages at that level were MHG and ON. Some people are really weird. . .

38MMcM
Oct 7, 2008, 10:07 pm

> 36 Has anyone checked to see if Google Books might have scanned it in?

Only a few seconds are required to confirm that, yes, scans are available in both Google Books and the Internet Archive.

39agorelik
Nov 17, 2008, 2:24 pm


That translation is from Giles of Rome's original Latin into medieval French, not English.

Other good, not as well-known as they should be, books are Thomas Aquinas and Ptolemy of Lucca's De Regimine Principum, Joseph ibn Falaquera's Epistle of the Debate, Joseph Albo's Book of Roots and Dino Compagni's Chronica.