Text name Ayenbite of Inwyt File name cmayenbi-m2 Manuscript Arundel 57, British Library, London Date 1340 Dialect Kentish (Canterbury) Genre Religious treatise Edition Morris, Richard. 1979. Dan Michel's Ayenbite of inwyt. EETS O.S. 278. London: Oxford University Press. Originally published by Trübner (London, 1866) as EETS O.S. 23. Sample Pp. 5-118, 249-271 Remarks The manuscript is a holograph written by Dan Michel, a monk at St. Anselm's, Canterbury, in 1340 when he was about 70, so the language may be representative of the late 13th century. The Ayenbite is a fairly literal translation of a French work with the standardized title Somme des vices et vertus (also known as Somme le Roi, Li Libres Roiaux de Vices et de Vertues, Le Livre des Commandmens, and Le Miroir du Monde). There is no complete translation in modern English, but the 15c Book of Vices and Virtues is very similar and more readable.
Following the Ayenbite are some short works by Dan Michel, which are also included in the corpus:
- Pater Noster, Ave Maria and Creed (pp. 262-263.10)
- A translation of Pseudo-Anselm (pp. 263.11-269)
- A treatise on the difference between men and beasts (pp. 270-271.6)
- Two more versions of the Ave Maria (pp. 271.6-end)
Other, later translations of the Somme le Roi are The Book of Vices and Virtues, c1450 (c1400) (a sample of which is included in the corpus as cmvices4-m34) and Caxton's Royal Book, 1486.
We thank Suzanne Evans Wagner for providing us with the following information about three French manuscripts of the Somme and with associated materials. The French source of the Ayenbite is likely British Museum, Cotton Cleopatra A.V, Egerton, 945, Add., 24125, 28162 (Tysor 1949:viii). Page images of the Cotton manuscript and a draft transcript are available at https://github.com/beatrice57/somme-des-vices-et-vertus, but the text is not annotated (neither tagged nor parsed). A second manuscript is British Museum, British Royal Manuscript Ms. 19cII (see also Library of Congress, MLA Rotograph collection, no. 306). The first part of this manuscript (lines 1-3497, pp. 1-124) is published in Tysor 1949 and is included in the Penn Parsed Corpus of Historical French as Somme Royal. The second part (lines 3498-7257, pp. 1-173) is published in Allen 1951. A third manuscript, MS Mazarine 870, is published in Brayer and Leurquin-Labie 2008, a fully revised version of Brayer's 1940 doctoral dissertation, which in addition to the transcription includes a glossary, a helpful introduction, and notes on the text. Users wishing to compare the Ayenbite to the Somme should realize that the Royal manuscript (the source for the Somme) is closer to the Mazarine than it is to the Cotton (the likely source for the Ayenbite).
File name CMAYENBI Text identifier M2 IR RELT AYENB Text name AYENB Author DAN MICHEL Period M2 Date of original 1250-1350 Date of manuscript 1250-1350 Contemporaneity SAME Dialect KL Verse or prose PROSE Text type REL TREAT Relationship to foreign original TRANSL Foreign original FRENCH Relationship to spoken language WRITTEN Sex of author MALE Age of author 60- Social rank of author X Audience description X Participant relationship X Interaction X Setting X Prototypical text category INSTR REL Sample SAMPLE X