scholarly journals Philippe Maupeu, Pèlerins de vie humaine. Autobiographie et allégorie narrative, de Guillaume de Deguileville à Octovien de Saint-Gelais

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mattia Cavagna
Keyword(s):  
Guillaume De Deguileville

On the Sources of Guillaume De Deguileville's Pèlerinage de L'Ame

PMLA ◽  
1910 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-308
Author(s):  
Stanley Leman Galpin
Keyword(s):  
Direct Influence ◽  
Jean De Meun ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Guillaume De Deguileville ◽  
Book Of Daniel ◽  
Divina Commedia

The sources of the allegorical religious trilogy of the Cistercian monk and prior, Guillaume de Deguileville, have not been thoroughly investigated until comparatively recent years. In 1896, Tobler, reporting on Stürzinger's edition of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, stated that Deguileville's characteristics as a poet must be compared to those of Jean de Meun and Daute, and that Deguileville's powers of description did not approach those of Dante. Gröber gives it as his opinion that Deguileville's trilogy was composed without any knowledge of the Divina Commedia, though there are analogies between the two. He cites St. Bernard, Aristotle, the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse, Dionysius Areopagita, and ms. illustrations, as sources of certain features of Ame. J. E. Hultman, in an excellent study of the poet's life and works, brings to light the sources of a large part of the three poems. His is the first serious attempt to discover the literary antecedents of Deguileville, and is a thorough, though inevitably not an exhaustive, treatment of the subject. Farinelli points out additional analogies between Dante and Deguileville, at the same time denying the possibility of any direct influence.

The Christian Lark: Spenser’s Faerie Queene I. x.51 and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 200-218
Author(s):  
Kathryn Walls
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Faerie Queene ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Standard Assumption ◽  
The Third ◽  
Guardian Angel ◽  
Guillaume De Deguileville ◽  
Love Triangle

Abstract The likening of the lark to the Christian worshipper as in Herbert’s “Easter Wings” was anticipated by both Spenser and Shakespeare in references that have been overlooked to date. These stand in a tradition most richly represented by the early fourteenth- century French allegorist Guillaume de Deguileville, in his Pèlerinage de l’Ame, in which the pilgrim soul, guided towards the gate of Heaven by his guardian angel, finds himself surrounded by larks whose cruciform shapes in flying match their singing of the name “Jhesu.” Having fallen for the second time when fighting the dragon, Spenser’s Red Cross Knight rises on the third morning to find himself victorious. In his rising he is compared with the lark at dawn. The Edenic setting (which underlines the theme of the redemption of “fallen” man by the risen Christ) is also illuminated by Deguileville’s Ame; Spenser’s two trees are reminiscent of the “green and the dry” in the French allegory, according to which Christ appears as the apple pinned to the dry tree in reparation for the apple stolen by Adam. When one examines Shakespeare’s reference to the lark in Sonnet 29 in the light of the tradition represented by Deguileville (whose work not only Spenser but also Shakespeare might have read in English translation) the question arises as to whether the beloved addressed in line 10 (“thee”) could be Christ, and the speaker a Christian worshipper moving from self reproach to Christian gratitude. Such an interpretation is challenged by the standard assumption that the sonnets reflect a narrative produced by a love triangle. But from Petrarch’s Canzoniere on, sequences of love sonnets had contained poems of religious adoration.

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