Keith Busby

At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Jofroi, a brother of the Dominican house of St Saviour's in Waterford, Ireland, translated into French and adapted from the Latin three texts: the De excidio Troiae of the so-called 'Dares Phrygius', the Breviarium historiae romanae of Eutropius, and Pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum. While the first two, La gerre de Troi and Le regne des Romains are generally close translations, Le secre de secres is much modified by omissions and interpolations of exempla and scientific material. In his enterprise, Jofroi was aided and abetted by his scribe, the Walloon merchant and custos, Servais Copale. This book is the first critical edition of Jofroi's uvre. The texts are accompanied by a general introduction, individual introductions to each of the three texts, extensive notes, an index of proper names, and a substantial glossary. Jofroi and Servais collaborated in Waterford, not Paris, as has long been assumed, and these texts are therefore witness to the importance of French as a literary language in southeastern Ireland.

This is the first full-length study of an important and neglected topic, namely the cultural and linguistic consequences of the 1169 invasion of Ireland and the ways in which it influenced views of the country in literature written in French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Works long known to have been written in French in multilingual Ireland - La geste des Engleis en Yrlande and The Walling of New Ross - are examined in their literary and historical context, while the works of the Dominican Jofroi de Waterford are shown definitively to have been written in Ireland, and not Paris, as has been assumed. After showing how Ireland acquired a reputation as a land of marvels through the dissemination and translation of early Latin texts of Irish origin and interest, the volume shows that increasing knowledge of the real Ireland does little to stymy the mirabilia hibernica in French vernacular literature. On the contrary, the notion is shown to be tenacious, to the extent of retrospectively associating some central motifs and figures of Arthurian romance with Ireland. This book is characterised by close attention to the details of linguistic expression and communication, as well as by historical, codicological, and literary contexts. It incorporates the results of original archival research.