British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow,
University of Cambridge
The Date, Author, and Context of the Roman de Silence:
A Reassessment
funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy as part of a six-month postdoctoral fellowship with EXC ‘Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’ at Freie Universität Berlin
Abstract
My research for Making Sense/Making Time involved close examination and reading of Nottingham, University Library, WLC/LM/6, an early manuscript of the Roman de Troie. This manuscript contains the one surviving copy of the Roman de Silence, an entertaining text in Old French verse about a noble child born as ‘Scilencia’ but raised as ‘Scilencius’. In an article that has just appeared in Medium Ævum, I argue that the text should be redated to between 1169 and 1206 (and more precisely perhaps to the 1190s). I also propose a new author for the text and outline an important context of composition in the borderlands between northern France and Flanders.
Nottingham, UL, WLC/LM/6, 222v
Silence is stripped and presented to King Ebain.