Narrative Repetition and the Vernacular Legendarium

Le résumé fourni par la source

Abstract The repetition of a text in a medieval manuscript is rarely remarked upon as anything more than the product of scribal oversight. This essay argues that it is much more. Taking as a central exemplum the codex now cataloged in the holdings of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as MS Français 185, the author will show how the reappearance of previously copied Lives in a single codex was received by medieval readers neither as a copyist error nor as an accident of rebinding but rather as a highly legible roadmap to the political and devotional structure of the text en mouvence. The designation in this manuscript in particular of five vitae, marked from the outset for repetition, offers precious information on the polyphonic complexities of medieval authorship, even as it provides new insight into what is perhaps the most persistent mystery in literary hagiology, that of the pleasure that might originally have undergirded a tradition so overwhelmingly constructed around the principle of repetition itself.

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