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Naming the Pilgrim:Authorship and Allegory in Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de la vie humaine Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath Guillaume de Deguileville's fourteenth-century pilgrimage allegories—the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine [Pilgrimage of Human Life], Pèlerinage de l'âme [Pilgrimage of the Soul], and Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist [Pilgrimage of Jesus Christ]—were among the most widely traveled literary texts of the Middle Ages. Before the mid-sixteenth century, portions of the trilogy had inspired translations in English, Dutch, German, Latin, and Castilian, in addition to adaptations into drama and prose forms in French.1 Philippe de Mézières proclaimed Deguileville's [End Page 179] allegory necessary to those seeking the holy sites of the East, and although the crusade urged by Mézières never materialized, Deguileville's allegory did touch the far West, when Christopher Columbus drew names for new-world islands from the Castilian translation.2 But the foreign land offering the warmest literary reception to Deguileville's pilgrim was certainly England. Deguileville's allegory shares structural and thematic elements with Piers Plowman and had an indisputable influence on Geoffrey Chaucer, whose only known complete translation from a single French source, the ABC, renders an acrostic lyric from the Pèlerinage de la vie humaine.3 In fifteenth-century England, prose translations [End Page 180] of the entire Vie and the later  me circulated along with verse translations from Deguileville's allegory by John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, two self-proclaimed disciples of Chaucer. Widely recognized for its role in popularizing the literary pilgrimage genre, Deguileville's allegory also witnesses another feature important to English readers: like the "Will" who narrates the vision of Piers Plowman, or the "Geoffrey" who recounts travel in The House of Fame, the narrator of Deguileville's allegory bears a name that readers interpreted as an authorial signature. Deguileville's narrator reflects the author's source of inspiration as well as his name: Deguileville's Vie identifies itself through citation as one of the earliest substantial responses to the Roman de la rose, the first major vernacular allegory to make extensive use of first-person narration. The Rose presents a dramatic development in creating a first-person narrator who acts diegetically not only as the poem's protagonist but also as an author, or rather as two authors, specific in identity and name, since the Rose acknowledges within its allegorical narrative that Jean de Meun continued and ended the poem more than forty years after the death of Guillaume de Lorris, who began the poem in about 1230. Forms of signature practice that require reader interpretation are not new to the late Middle Ages, but the manner of signature popularized by the Rose marks a significant change. Although twelfth-century romance writers, including Chrétien de Troyes, Béroul, Thomas d'Angleterre, and Marie de France, name themselves within their works, such naming typically appears as exterior to the story in some fashion, in a third-person prologue or colophon, or as an aside within the text. These writers' names are not presented as part of the protagonist's identity and their texts do not present the entire narrative primarily as a subject for readers' interpretation, frequently affiliating their matter with history instead.4 Naming in the Rose links authorial identity to the first-person [End Page 181] narrator-protagonist through readers' interpretation, and the significance of this development to later representations of authorship has been widely recognized.5 By contrast, Deguileville's Vie has won little recognition for its influence on models of vernacular authorship, despite its explicit citation of the Rose and the breadth of its medieval reading community.6 The lack of modern editions may have contributed to the low profile of these allegories in literary studies today, but the common description of Deguileville's work as "moralizing" may also play a role in obscuring the complexity of Deguileville's response to the Rose and his allegory's subsequent influence.7 Both the 1331 Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and its 1355 recension have been characterized as monastic correctives to the Rose's questionable morality. Scholarship on the Rose imagery...
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