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Introduction to La Danse macabre

Choice of Base Manuscript

The French Danse macabre is extant in fifteen manuscripts, the earliest dating from 1426–27 (see Headnote in Textual Notes) and the rest falling between the mid-late fifteenth century, nineteen incunabula printed from 1485 to 1500 alone, and one sixteenth-century manuscript that is a copy of an incunabulum (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, MS 3896, copying Marchant’s edition of 1490). Authorship of the Danse remains uncertain, but several scholars have pointed to the fact that in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France lat. 14904, dated to c. 1440 by Gilbert Ouy (Les manuscrits de l’Abbaye de Saint-Victor, 2.327–28), the Danse is specified in the contemporary table of contents as being the text as copied from the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents and is collocated with texts by Jean Gerson (1363–1429) and Nicolas de Clemanges (1360–1437). Meanwhile, a Catalàn translation of the Danse, made at the end of the fifteenth century by Pedro Miguel de Carbonell, ends with a verba translatoris (words of the translator) alleging his source to have been penned by “un sant home doctor e Canceller de Paris en lengua francesa apellat Joannes Climachus sive Climages” (a devout man, a doctor and clerk of Paris in French named Joannes Climachus or Climages) (Saugnieux, Les danses macabres de France et d’Espagne, p. 25). This coincidence has suggested to Maya Dujakovic (“The Dance of Death, the Dance of Life,” pp. 222–27) that the work was or was believed to come from the circles of Jean Gerson (who was a chancellor at the University of Paris) and Nicolas de Clemanges. However, Jöel Saugnieux (Les danses macabres de France et d’Espagne, pp. 54–55) and Sophie Oosterwijk (“Of Dead Kings,” pp. 153–54) advance objections to this argument, citing the circumstantial quality of the evidence.

The Danse macabre is clearly Lydgate’s direct source for the Dance of Death, as he alleges in his opening verba translatoris in the A version, in which he describes seeing “Machabres Daunce” (A version, line 24) at “Seint Innocentis” (A version, line 35). In most manuscripts of the Danse, the opening and closing stanzas of the work are spoken by an authority figure variously named “docteur,” “l’acteur,” or “maistre.” In Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 14989, a manuscript belonging to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, however, this speaker is explicitly identified as “Machabre Docteur.” (According to Kurtz [Dance of Death and the Macabre Spirit, p. 23], the same speaker marker occurs at the end of the text in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, naf. 10032; we have not, unfortunately, been able to verify this through consultation of the original manuscript.) Lydgate calls the same character “Machabre the Doctour” (A version, before line 641). Hanno Wijsman dates the French manuscript of the Danse containing the “Machabre docteur” speaker marker to 1426 or 1427 on the basis of its watermark; he further shows that it was once bound with the Division des Orleanois contre les Anglois, which treats the death of Thomas Montacute, Duke of Salisbury, who died in 1428. These details place BNF MS fr. 14989 in Paris right after the Danse macabre mural was finished and during or just after Lydgate’s visit in 1426. Wijsman goes on to argue that the unique level of visual detail in this manuscript version’s speaker markers suggests that it may have been copied directly from the mural, which the scribe aimed to verbally describe in his otherwise unillustrated copy (see “Un manuscrit de Philippe Le Bon”). In addition, the order of speakers in the A version of Lydgate’s Dance matches the order of speakers in this and other manuscripts of the Danse; Marchant’s 1485 and subsequent editions follow a slightly altered order, suggesting he was working from a different recension. This manuscript, BNF MS fr. 14989, thus seems closest to Lydgate’s source for his Dance of Death, and we have therefore chosen to edit and translate its contents to accompany Lydgate’s text.

Lydgate’s Translation of the Danse

In the A version’s final two stanzas, titled “Lenvoye de Translator” or “translator’s envoy,” Lydgate adopts the wellknown pose of the humble translator, professing his lack of “suffisaunce” (fluency, line 671) in French due to being an English native. He also invites his readers to correct his translation where it is wanting and notes that he translates “[n]ot worde by worde but folwyng the substaunce” (not word by word but following the content, line 666). This is a familiar posture of proclaimed English deference before the cultural might of literary French that mirrors Lydgate’s fellow Francophile English predecessors: see the notes to lines 669 and 672 of the A version of Lydgate’s Dance. Lydgate’s professed difficulties with French are belied, however, by the translation itself. Lydgate’s close attention to the language of his original yet simultaneous impulse to adapt and rewrite to vivid effect are already visible from the opening stanzas of his work. The opening stanza of the original Danse, for example, is as follows:

O, creature raisonnable,Qui desires vie eternelle,Tu as cy doctrine notablePour bien finer vie mortelle.La danse macabre s’appelleQue chascun a danser apprant.A homme et femme est mort naturelle;Mort n’espargne petit ne grant.(lines 7–14)

O, creature endowed with reason,You who long for eternal life,You have before you an important preceptFor properly ending your mortal life.It is called the Danse macabre,Which everyone learns to dance.Death is natural to men and women;Death spares neither the lowly nor the lofty.

In Lydgate’s rendition, we find:

O creatures ye that ben resonable who are reasonableThe liif desiring wiche is eternal,Ye may se here doctrine ful notable,seeYoure lif to lede wich that is mortal,Therby to lerne in especialin particularHowe ye shul trace the Daunce of Machabre,followTo man and womman yliche natural,alikeFor Deth ne spareth hy ne lowe degré. does not spare(lines 41–48)

Here Lydgate’s heavy reliance on cognates has the double advantage of gesturing extensively to his French source while rendering the text into a flowing English idiom. But by adding “ye shul trace” in line 46 he subtly highlights the dynamic performative quality of the Danse macabre, whereas the French original just presents the phrase as the text’s title. These processes — of relying on cognates but also insisting on alterations that emphasize, in particular, the active participatory quality of Death’s dance — are characteristic of Lydgate’s whole text.

In our own translation, we have remained as faithful as possible to the original French Danse, and we note especially syntactically and linguistically challenging moments in our Explanatory Notes. Since the A version of Lydgate’s text is closer to the Danse than the later B revision, all references to Lydgate refer to this version unless otherwise noted. Furthermore, this translation was intentionally done without consulting Lydgate’s own in the process, lest his word choices unduly influence the modern English renderings and thus taint the modern English with Middle English usage and, more importantly, leave a distorted impression of the closeness of Lydgate’s translation. Yet the final results, we think, speak for themselves: for all the distance between Middle and modern English, our new translation helps show that Lydgate offers a remarkably precise rendering of his French original in his instances of close translation.

Within our own translation, one particularly difficult decision has revolved around naming the Danse’s representation of its deadly interlocutor. The French text renders this character as “le mort,” literally “the dead man,” a figure clearly intended to double the living persons, all male, to whom it speaks. That “le mort” is the terrifying double of the Danse’s all-male characters is also suggested by widespread danse macabre iconography, in which each living person is represented in conversation with his or her own emaciated and decomposing figure. In the later Danse macabre des femmes the figure is, fittingly, “la morte,” “the dead woman.” The French term for the abstract concept of death, meanwhile, is “la mort,” gendered female. We have nevertheless chosen to translate “le mort” as “Death” for several reasons: firstly, “the dead man” seemed aesthetically clunky; secondly, this is the term used throughout the Middle English death poetry that forms the subject of this collection, suggesting that contemporary English readers, like Lydgate, would have understood “le mort” as the abstract concept of death, despite the gendering of the term (see, for example, the illustration of Death in MS Douce 322, discussed in the Headnote to the Explanatory Notes for Lydgate’s “Death’s Warning to the World” [DIMEV 4905]). We have therefore chosen to render “le mort” by the more efficient and historically pertinent “Death,” while cognizant that there is no good method for underscoring the way in which “le mort,” in the spirit of late medieval death poetry as a whole, neatly combines the idea of death as universalized abstraction with that of death as a particularized humanoid figure that inversely mirrors the living bodies of its interlocutors.

Given the similarity in content between this text and Lydgate’s adaptation thereof, the reader is referred to the Explanatory Notes accompanying Lydgate’s Dance of Death (both A and B versions) for any overlapping material. The Explanatory Notes that follow here concern details specific to this text and to this translation. The Latin here and at the end of the poem has been translated by C. J. Lambert (Columbia University), whose accompanying notes are reproduced and marked accordingly. We also thank Lucas Wood for his invaluable assistance in helping us work through some of the thornier sections of the text.

Headnote to the Textual Notes

Our edition of the Danse macabre intentionally uses an early manuscript, Paris, BNF fonds francaise MS 14989, containing the name “Machabre Docteur,” as its base-text (see Headnote to Explanatory Notes for the Danse macabre on p. 139), whereas other modern editions of the Danse all take Guyot Marchant’s 1485 and 1486 editions as their base-text. Warren also opts for a manuscript as her base-text: British Library, Additional MS 38858. Emendations of our base-text have been made simply for grammatical clarity, but we adduce the other modern editions as parallels to our editorial choices; in a few cases obviously corrupt readings have been emended in accordance with the other editions.

Manuscripts:

  1. Chantilly, Bibliothèque et Archives du Château, MS 502 (olim 1920), fols. 1r–20v.
  2. Lille, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 139 (olim 364), fols. 233v–39v.
  3. London, British Library, Additional, MS 38858, fols. 2r–12r.
  4. Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 3896, fols. 237r–64v.
  5. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds latin MS 14904, fols. 64r–72r.
  6. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 995, fols. 1r–17r.
  7. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 1055, fols. 68r–75r.
  8. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 1181, fols. 137v–40v (fragment).
  9. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 1186, fols. 89r–98v.
  10. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 14989, fols. 1r–12v (base text for this edition).
  11. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 25434, fols. 18r–35v.
  12. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français MS 25550, fols. 235r–49v.
  13. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions françaises MS 10032, fols. 209r–23v.
  14. Saint-Omer, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 127, fols. 201r–06r.
  15. Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 907, fols. 99v–114v.

Incunabula:

Editions:

  • La grande danse macabre des hommes et des femmes precédée du dict des trois mors et des trois vifz, du debat du corps et de l’âme, et la complaincte de l’âme dampnée. Paris: Bailleu, 1862.
  • de Lincy, Le Roux, and L. M. Tisserand, eds. “La danse macabre reproduite textuellement d’apres l’unique exemplaire connu de l’édition princeps de Guyot Marchant (Paris, 1485) et completée avec l’édition de 1486.” In Paris et ses historiens aux XIVe et XVe Siècles. Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1867. Pp. 291–317.
  • Dufour, Valentin, ed. La dance macabre peinte sous les charniers des Saints Innocents de Paris (1425): reproduction de l’édition princeps donnée par Guyot Marchant, texte et gravures sur bois (1485). Paris: Féchoz, 1874. Rpt. 1875. Rpt. 1891.
  • Champion, Pierre, ed. La danse macabre, reproduction en facsimilé de l’édition de Guy Marchant, Paris, 1486. Paris: Éditions des Quatre Chemins, 1925.
  • Warren, Florence, and Beatrice White, eds. “The French Text.” In The Dance of Death, Edited from MSS. Ellesmere 26/A.13 and B.M. Lansdowne 699, Collated with the Other Extant MSS. EETS o.s. 181. London: Oxford University Press, 1931; Rpt. New York: Klaus Reprint Co., 1971. Pp. 79–96.
  • Chaney, Edward F., ed. La danse macabré des charniers des Saints Innocents à Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1945.
  • Saugnieux, Joël, ed. “La danse macabre française de Guyot Marchant (1486).” In Les danses macabres de France et d’Espagne et leurs prolongements littéraires. Lyon: Emmanuel Vitte, 1972. Pp. 143–64.
  • Kaiser, Gert, ed. and trans. “La danse macabre” in Der tanzende Tod: Mittelalterliche Totentänze. Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1982. Pp. 72–107.
  • Fein, David A., ed. and trans. The Danse Macabre Printed by Guyot Marchant, 1485. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013.