ALTHOUGH there exist Latin writings by such commentators on French affairs as Salimbene di Adamo and Guillaume de Nangis concerning the Angevin occupation of Sicily (1266-82), to my knowledge no works written in French can be associated with that occupation. It is therefore worth remarking that a vernacular version of Boethius can be tentatively assigned to the island at that time. In the course of his important survey of the medieval French translations of the Consolatio Philosophiae,¹ Antoine Thomas discussed an interesting early prose version which he had previously identified as the work of an 'Italian', one Bonaventura da Demena.² This translation Is one of four made in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and now extant in unique manuscripts. The attribution of the version in MS Bibliotheque Nationale f. fr. 821 to Bonaventura is based on an incidental insertion of the translator's name into one of the long rubrics of which he was fond: 'ge, Bonaventure, qi ne sun de Demena, translateors don Boece de letre en volgar francois'. [f. 48] But beyond this notice, Thomas was able only to add: 'Malheureusement, nous n'avons aucun indice ni sur la date a laquelle vivait ce "translateur", ni sur le lieu de "Demena" d'ou' il tirait son nom, ni sur Ia traduction de Boece en italien dont il a fait mention dans son proambule, laquelle ne s'identifie, a ce qu'il semble, avec aucune de celles qui sont connues.'³ That preamble mentioned by Thomas contains the only other information we have from Bonaventura's hand about himself and what he intended to do in his translation:

On the basis of the comments above and as the result of some suggestions made to me by Professor Lynn White, Jr., I believe it is possible to locate generally the place-name Demena and by deduction arrive at some notion of the circumstances of the translation. Demena would appear to be an obscure, ancient name for a region of Sicily. It is cited as the birthplace of St Luke of Armenta (d. 984) in the Latin version of the anonymous Greek vita printed in the Acta Sanctorum, 'Quare a patria Demena, ad Beati Philippi Agyrenaei coenobium veniens'.⁴ The Bollandist commentary on the life of the saint includes a long digression on the place-name Demena. After eliminating the Calabrian part of ancient Sicily as the location of Demena, the commentary goes on to quote an observation made by Tommaso Pazello (1498-1570) in his De rebus Siculis:

Following Fazello's delineation of the north-eastern third of the island--roughly that bounded by the triangle connecting Messina, Palermo and Syracuse--the Bollandist commentary cites some further etymological speculations that would relate Demena to the old town of Menae near the source of the river Terias (S. Leonardo) or to the mountainous area of Enna (Castrogiovanni), and it concludes that the exact birthplace of St Luke of Armenta remains uncertain.

Taking the conjecture of Fazello, who was born in Sicily and founded modern Sicilian historiography, as the least etymologically tendentious, we may note that the north-eastern third of the island was the locus of French influence from Norman times into the late middle ages. The revival of that influence in the thirteenth century was, of course, due to the occupation of Sicily by the forces of Charles of Anjou during the years I266-82. Although a few towns in the vicinity of Messina were in French hands at various times from 1299 to 1302, and there were a half-dozen Angevin expeditions against the island until 1372,⁶ Sicily remained essentially free from French influence after the Vespers until the Bourbon ventures of the nineteenth century.

Charles imported into his kingdom in Italy and Sicily a host of petty nobles and knights as both colonizers and administrators, granting some 700 small fiefs to Frenchmen and Provencals and staffing nearly all important posts with them. Of the 125 provincial Justiciars, for example, only a fifth seem to have been Italian.⁷ Both by necessity and by design, then, the language of government was French, even in the remotest part of Sicily. French was also, to a lesser extent, the language of religion, and its use was carefully noted by the natives. Partly because of a succession of French Popes--Urban IV, Clement IV, and Martin IV--French friars had been brought into some of the mendicant convents. In 1269, early in Charles's conquest, the Dominican convent at Pavia was sacked because some of the friars were French, and at the time of the Vespers in Palermo (March, 1282), the rioters broke into the mendicant convents, forced the alien friars to pronounce a shibboleth, and slew anyone failing the test.⁸

Antoine Thomas was persuaded that Bonaventura was a cleric, 'probablement membre d'un Ordre religieux, plein de piete et de zele pour le salut de son prochain'.⁹ At least one other early fourteenth-century translator of Boethius, Renaut de Louhans, was a Dominican, but there were other sorts of religious houses active at that time in Sicily from which Bonaventura might have operated. There was a Cistercian monastery at Campo Sant'Orsola, near which the Vespers began. Also close to Palermo were the Benedictine monasteries attached to the Cathedral of Monreale and at San Martino. In Demena or the north-eastern part of the island was the Benedictine monastery at Maniacum near Mt Etna, and on the slopes of the volcano itself was the Convent of S. Nicola d'Arena. Just west of Messina was a Norman nunnery, L'Abbadiazza, which flourished until the middle of the fourteenth century. And at the harbour of Messina was the Basilian monastery of Salvatore dei Greci.

The rejection of the tradition of Benedictine scholarship in the Norman monasteries in Sicily contributed, as Professor White has observed,¹⁰ to the decay of cloistered learning in the Mediterranean area and helped to turn vulgarizers like Bonaventura and the mendicant Renaut toward new audiences.¹¹ Bonaventura continually alludes to his lay audience, and it is conceivable that his genz de cist monde who desired to hear new things and novelles contes were just that host of imported Frenchmen upon whom Charles of Anjou relied for the local administration of his policies.

Other earlier translations of the Consolatio into medieval German and English as well as French helped to establish a lay audience for Boethius which Bonaventura uniquely sought to accommodate by two kinds of interpolations. In classic fashion, Bonaventura seems to have tried both to delight and instruct his lay audience by making the Consolatio a vehicle of religious instruction and by enlivening some of the narratives sketched by Boethius. Bonaventura instructed downright crudely by inserting into the sequence of Boethian syllogisms, 'les .x. commandamenz de la loi divine et les generals comandamenz de la dileccions de Deu et del prosme qui se treuvent en le Vielz Testament, et aucune doctrine des conseilz et de la profeccions del Novel Testament'. [f. 38v] He says Boethius omitted the Ten Commandments because they are already recounted in the scriptures, but he will put them in so as to make the work 'plus vive et plus proufitable' to laymen.

One example of what Bonaventura did, presumably to delight his audience, has already achieved some notoriety. It is his narration of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or 'Olfeus et sa moillier'. Paulin Paris called it an imitation, Gaston Paris and Antoine Thomas a travesty, and Louis Moland a parody.¹² All are wrong. It is the attempt of an unsophisticated cleric to appeal to an alien lay audience through a language not his own. Untranslatable is the effect produced:

Setting aside our judgements of what Bonaventura has made of the poignant story of Orpheus and Eurydice, we may comment on the curious language of this text, 'Franco-Italian' as Langlois calls it,¹³ in the light of our having suggested the Sicilian origin of the translator and perhaps also the provenance of the work and its audience. Unlike some other French works in this manuscript, e.g. the Enfances Hector, which may owe their exotic linguistic features to having been successively recopied by Italian scribes,'⁴ the version of the Consolatio was probably translated into idiosyncratic French from its maker's own earlier Sicilian version. In the case of neither text do we have an example of a work written by a speaker of some regional 'Franco-Italian' dialect, a concept which may exist only as the construct of nineteenth-century philologists. But whatever the oddity of his language, Bonaventura may have achieved better than he knew in his effort to improve the reading of his lay French audience. Boethius's relation of the path he took to overcome his earthly suffering at the hands of the Ostrogothic invaders of Italy, by learning to despise not only his present pain but his former glories as well, would have provided a sobering lesson to the unwelcome foreigners who were to stay in Sicily for Vespers.

R. A. Dwyer

FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Notes

1 In 'Traductions francaises de la Consolatio Philosophiae de Boece,' Histoire litteraire de la France, vol. XXXVII, 1938, pp.419-88, Thomas describes eight versions and Mario Roques adds a ninth and alludes to two more. I have described a twelfth version in 'Another Boece', Romance Philology, XIX(1965), pp. 268-70. See also R. H. Lucas, 'Medieval French Translations of the Latin Classics to 1500'. Speculum, XLV (1970), pp. 225-53 and my 'Manuscripts of the Medieval French Boethius', Notes and Queries (April, 1971), pp. 124-5

2 In Romania, XLI(1912), pp. 615-6.

3 Hist. litt, p.467. Lucas, p. 233, in 1970 says no more than this.

4 October, vol. VI, p. 337.

5 Ibid., pp. 332-3.