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The ''Sequence of Saint Eulalia'', also known as the ''Canticle of Saint Eulalia'' (french: Séquence/Cantilène de sainte Eulalie) is the earliest surviving piece of French
hagiography A hagiography (; ) is a biography of a saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as well as, by extension, an adulatory and idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in any of the world's religions. Early Christian hagiographies migh ...
and one of the earliest extant texts in the vernacular
langues d'oïl The ''langues d'oïl'' (; ) are a dialect continuum that includes standard French and its closest autochthonous relatives historically spoken in the northern half of France, southern Belgium, and the Channel Islands. These belong to the larger ...
(
Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...
). It dates from around 880.
Eulalia of Mérida Eulalia of Mérida (Augusta Emerita in 292 - Augusta Emerita 10 December, 304) was a young Roman Christian martyred in Augusta Emerita, the capital of Lusitania (modern Mérida, Spain), during the Persecution of Christians under Diocletian. O ...
was an early Christian martyr from Mérida,
Spain , image_flag = Bandera de España.svg , image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg , national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond") , national_anthem = (English: "Royal March") , i ...
, who was killed during the
Persecution of Diocletian The Diocletianic or Great Persecution was the last and most severe persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. In 303, the Roman emperor, emperors Diocletian, Maximian, Galerius, and Constantius Chlorus, Constantius issued a series of edicts r ...
around 304. Her legend is recounted in the 29 verses of the ''Sequence'', in which she resists pagan threats, bribery and torture from the pagan emperor
Maximian Maximian ( la, Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus; c. 250 – c. July 310), nicknamed ''Herculius'', was Roman emperor from 286 to 305. He was ''Caesar'' from 285 to 286, then ''Augustus'' from 286 to 305. He shared the latter title with his ...
. She miraculously survives being burned at the stake, but is finally decapitated. She then ascends to heaven in the form of a
dove Columbidae () is a bird family consisting of doves and pigeons. It is the only family in the order Columbiformes. These are stout-bodied birds with short necks and short slender bills that in some species feature fleshy ceres. They primarily ...
. The ''Sequence'' was composed in verse around 880, soon after the rediscovery of the relics of a saint of the same name,
Eulalia of Barcelona Eulalia (c. 290 – February 12, 303), co-patron saint of Barcelona, was a 13-year-old Roman Christian virgin who was martyred in Barcelona during the persecution of Christians in the reign of emperor Diocletian (although the Sequence of Saint ...
, in 878.


Manuscript

The manuscript containing the ''Sequence'' is a collection of sermons by
Gregory of Nazianzus Gregory of Nazianzus ( el, Γρηγόριος ὁ Ναζιανζηνός, ''Grēgorios ho Nazianzēnos''; ''Liturgy of the Hours'' Volume I, Proper of Saints, 2 January. – 25 January 390,), also known as Gregory the Theologian or Gregory N ...
. It is first mentioned in a 12th-century catalog of the library of
Saint-Amand Abbey Saint-Amand Abbey (''Abbaye de Saint-Amand''), once known as Elno, Elnon or Elnone Abbey, is a former Benedictine abbey in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, Nord, France. History The abbey was founded around 633-639 in what was once a great tract of uninh ...
, although the production of the manuscript has been dated to the early 9th century. It is not known with certainty where it was produced. B. Bischoff suggests that it came from a
scriptorium Scriptorium (), literally "a place for writing", is commonly used to refer to a room in medieval European monasteries devoted to the writing, copying and illuminating of manuscripts commonly handled by monastic scribes. However, lay scribes and ...
in (Lower) Lotharingia, but not from Saint-Amand itself, given its style of construction and the handwriting, which cannot be matched to other manuscripts produced there during the same period. The manuscript is less significant for its original content, however, than for the empty pages at the end that later scribes filled in with additional texts. These include: *the top half of f141: a 14-line Latin poem about Saint Eulalia () *the top half of f141v: the ''Sequence of Saint Eulalia'' in vernacular Romance *from the bottom of f141v to the top of f143: the (), written in a variety of
Old High German Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050. There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High ...
. The ''Sequence'' and the are written in the same hand, and since the preamble of the mentions the death of
Louis III Louis III may refer to: * Louis the Younger, sometimes III of Germany (835–882) * Louis III of France (865–882) * Louis the Blind, Louis III, Holy Roman Emperor, (c. 880–928) * Louis the Child, sometimes III of Germany (893–911) * Louis I ...
, both additions to the manuscript are dated to 882 or soon thereafter. Again, it cannot be established with certainty where these additions were made, whether at Saint-Amand or elsewhere. When
Jean Mabillon Dom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B., (; 23 November 1632 – 27 December 1707) was a French Benedictine monk and scholar of the Congregation of Saint Maur. He is considered the founder of the disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics. Early life Mabil ...
visited Saint-Amand Abbey in 1672, he made a hasty copy of the , but neither he nor his hosts seem to have recognized the significance of the ''Sequence'' immediately preceding it. When Mabillon and the historian Johannes Schilter attempted to obtain a better transcription of the in 1693, the monks of the abbey were unable to locate the manuscript. It remained lost throughout the 18th century, until the entire contents of the abbey library were confiscated and transferred to
Valenciennes Valenciennes (, also , , ; nl, label=also Dutch, Valencijn; pcd, Valincyinnes or ; la, Valentianae) is a commune in the Nord department, Hauts-de-France, France. It lies on the Scheldt () river. Although the city and region experienced a s ...
in 1792, by order of the
revolutionary A revolutionary is a person who either participates in, or advocates a revolution. The term ''revolutionary'' can also be used as an adjective, to refer to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavor. ...
government. In September 1837,
Hoffmann von Fallersleben August Heinrich Hoffmann (, calling himself von Fallersleben, after his hometown; 2 April 179819 January 1874) was a German poet. He is best known for writing "Das Lied der Deutschen", whose third stanza is now the national anthem of Germany, an ...
visited the library of Valenciennes with the intention of unearthing the lost text of the . According to his account, it only took him one afternoon to find the manuscript and to realize that it contained another important text, the ''Sequence of Saint Eulalia''.


Text

The Eulalia text is a
sequence In mathematics, a sequence is an enumerated collection of objects in which repetitions are allowed and order matters. Like a set, it contains members (also called ''elements'', or ''terms''). The number of elements (possibly infinite) is calle ...
or "prose" consisting of 14 assonant couplets, each written on one line and separated by a punctus, followed by a final unpaired coda verse. The ''Sequence'' follows no strict
meter The metre (British spelling) or meter (American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its prefi ...
. Most of the couplets consist of two ten-syllable verses, although some have 11, 12, or 13 syllables. Both the vernacular ''Sequence'' and the Latin poem that precedes it show similarities with the hymn to Eulalia in the , by the 4th-century Christian poet
Prudentius Aurelius Prudentius Clemens () was a Roman citizen, Roman Christianity, Christian poet, born in the Roman Empire, Roman province of Tarraconensis (now Northern Spain) in 348.H. J. Rose, ''A Handbook of Classical Literature'' (1967) p. 508 He prob ...
. A transcription of the original text is provided below (with abbreviations expanded and some word boundaries inserted), along with a reconstructed phonetic transcription and an English translation.


Analysis


Dialect

The language of the ''Sequence'' presents characteristics of Walloon, Champenois, and Picard. At the time, these three Oïl varieties shared a common , or written literary koiné. The evidence points to a geographic origin for the text in modern-day Wallonia or an adjacent region of north-east France. Some northern/northeastern dialectal features of the texts are: *the stressed form of the feminine singular dative pronoun (line 13) *the 1st person plural imperative ending in (line 26) *the unpalatalized initial in the forms and (< Latin ), contrasting with in
Francien Francien is a 19th-century term in linguistics that was applied to the French dialect that was spoken in the Île-de-France region (with Paris at its centre) before the establishment of the French language as a standard language."Ce terme est un ...
dialect to the south (mod. Fr. ) * vocalization of before in (line 4, < ) *lowering of pre-tonic to in (line 6, < *) and (line 8, < ). In contrast, the
epenthetic In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek language, Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable (''prothesis (linguistics), prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syll ...
indicated by the forms (lines 3, 4, < ), (line 21, < ) and (line 16, < ) is more characteristic of central French dialects. The pronoun that appears in line 19 (instead of the expected feminine form ) has been variously explained as a dialectal feature, a pejorative neuter ("they threw ''it'' into the fire"), or simply a scribal error.


Line 15

Line 15 of the ''Sequence'' is "one of the most vexed lines of Old French literature". The identity of the verb is debated: early editors read , but a reexamination of the manuscript by Learned (1941) revealed that the copyist originally wrote . Scholars disagree about whether the line turning the ⟨r⟩ into an ⟨n⟩ was an inadvertent ink smudge or a deliberate correction by the copyist. Several interpretations have been proposed for both readings, including: * : "reunites, assembles", "affirms" * : "hardens", "adores", "endures" Scholars further disagree about whether the
possessive adjective Possessive determiners (from la, possessivus, translit=; grc, κτητικός / ktētikós - en. ktetic Lallu) are determiners which express possession. Some traditional grammars of English refer to them as possessive adjectives, though they do ...
in refers to Eulalia or to Maximian, and about the nature of this . Questions also surround the syntactic construction of the line, as well as the interpretation of the verse within the context of the ''Sequence''. The following examples illustrate the variety of translations suggested for this verse: * "" * "" * "She steeled her soul (she strengthened herself inwardly)" * "That she worship his false god" * ""Hilty (1990, p. 73)


See also

*
Oaths of Strasbourg The Oaths of Strasbourg were a military pact made on 14 February 842 by Charles the Bald and Louis the German against their older brother Lothair I, the designated heir of Louis the Pious, the successor of Charlemagne. One year later the Treat ...


Notes


References

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Further reading

*Jeanette M. A. Beer (1989). "Eulalie, La Séquence de Ste.". ''
Dictionary of the Middle Ages The ''Dictionary of the Middle Ages'' is a 13-volume encyclopedia of the Middle Ages published by the American Council of Learned Societies between 1982 and 1989. It was first conceived and started in 1975 with American medieval historian Jo ...
''. Vol. 4. * *


External links

*
Cantilène de sainte Eulalie
from the Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes

(B. Bauer and J. Slocum), Lesson 4: ''La Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie'' *

(Yves Chartier) {{Authority control Medieval poetry Medieval French literature Christian hagiography Walloon culture History of Wallonia 9th-century poems Works set in the 4th century Diocletianic Persecution