Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I’ in Medieval Authors

Abstract

Professor Stephan Kuttner, who proved—basing himself on V. L. Kennedy—the indebtedness of Pierre de Roissy, Chancellor of Chartres and author of a Manuale de mysteriis ecclesiae, to the Poenitentiale of Robert of Flamborough, Canon Penitentiary of St. Victor, shows (Trad. 2, 497 seq.) that Roissy went so far in his procedure (which we would call today ‘literary plagiarism’) of incorporating entire sections from Flamborough's work, that he even borrowed from him, tel quel, certain autobiographical facts which, in the light of historical evidence, could not possibly apply to himself. For example, when we read in Roissy: ‘Ego tamen …a duobus parisiensibus episcopis, Odone et Petro, habui ut ubique eorum auctoritate dispensarem …,’ we must realize that the privilege of dispensation of which he speaks was granted only to Flamborough, just as it was Flamborough alone who transferred to papal authority the case referred to in the words: 'superstitem, ut ordinaretur, ad papam transmisi.’ Thus, Roissy is substituting his own ego to that of his source. Kuttner wonders ‘how he could easily get away with this,’ for ‘the disproportion between Peter's true standing and the air of personal experience he affects is particularly striking in those cases which suggest, as they do, the experience and powers of a spiritual director of clerics'—that is, qualifications certainly not possessed by Roissy. The borrowed character of the passage ‘Ego tamen … a duobus …,’ according to Kuttner, disposes of a chronological difficulty in the Chancellor's biography (for, if genuine, the passage would have proved that Peter was active in Paris as late as 1208—an assumption contradicted by other known facts).

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